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THACKEEAY 



THE 



HUMOURIST AND THE MAN OF LEHERS. 

OF HIS 

LIFE AND LITERARY LABOURS, 

INCLUDING 

A SELECTION FROM HIS CHARACTERISTIC SPEECHES, KG W FOR 
THE FIRST TIME GATHERED TOGETHER. 

By THEODOEE TAYLOE, Esq., '^\^mjJk.:, 

Menibre de la SocUU des Gena de Zettree, / ' 

'* TO WHICH IS ADDED 

m MEMORIAM— By Charles Dickens 



AMD 



A SKETCH, BY ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 

•WITH I>OE/TI2;JLIT Ji.J<TJD ILIiTJSTE,-A.TI02iTS. 







NEW YORK : 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

448 & 445 BEOADWAY. 

1864. 






^ 




WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. 

A BEOBNT PEOTOGBAPH BY «BNE8T EDWARDS, B. A. 




'^BCEliH.Hy. 



His Residenck in Kensington Palace Gardens, 

Built after a favourite design in red brick, and eimilar in style to Old Kensington 
Palace close by, which was flniahed in the reign of Queen Anne. 




MR. THACKERAY AND THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE, 

(An imaginary sketch made at the Garrick Club many years ago. This por- 
trait of Mr. Thackeray as he used to appear, 12 or 15 years since, is remarkable for 
its singular excellence, although the hair is represented slightly different from Its 
appearance in later years.) 




THE THACKERAY ARMS. 

(The professional pen and pencil are made to take the place of a Falcon, the 
proper family crest ; and the favourite spectacleB, so generally observed in Mr. 
Thackeray's early sketches, do service as the motto.) 



FAC-SIMILE OF M« THACKERAY S HANO-WRrTINQ. 

CocMi. IV. 



ImwC- 



K.*i'^.'fc-^->»w-**-y 



PEEFACE. 



The following memoir of the late Mr. Thack- 
eray may, perhaps, be acceptable as filling an inter- 
mediate place between the newspaper • or review 
article and the more elaborate biography which 
may be expected in due course. The writer had 
some peculiar means of acquiring information for 
the purpose of his sketch, and to this he has added 
such particulars as have been already made public in 
English and foreign publications and other scattered 
sources. The common complaints against memoirs 
of this necessary haste and incomplete character will 
not be repeated by those who are accustomed to test 
questions in morals by the principles which under- 
lie them. That there is nothing necessarily indeli- 
cate or improper, in the desire of the public to obtain 
some personal knowledge of the great and good who 
have just passed away, is assumed by every daily, 
weekly, and quarterly journal which on occasions 
of this kind furnish their readers with such details 
as they are able to obtain, and which, in no case, con- 
fine themselves strictly to the public career of the 
deceased. 



viii Preface, 



Although some facts in the private life of Mr. 
Thackeray will be found to be touched upon in these 
pages, the writer is not conscious of having written 
a line which could give pain to others. 

The writer cannot conclude without acknowl- 
edging the kind assistance he has received in fur- 
nishing anecdotes and other particulars from Mr. 
Kinglake, the brilliant historian ; Mons. Lacroix ; 
Mr. George Cruikshank, the eminent artist ; Mr. 
Goodlake, Lady Bulwer Lytton, Mr. Moy Thomas, 
Mr. Blanchard, Mr. George Linley, and others whose 
names the author is not permitted to mention. 

• T. T. T. 

Grand Hotel Louvois, 
Rue Richelieu, Paris. 
25 Jan. 1864. 



- THACKEEAY; 

THB 

HUMOURIST AND THE MAK OF LETTERS. 

THE STORY 

OF HIS LIFE AND LABOURS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Thackeray's ancestors — dr. thomas thackeray, head- 
master OP HARROW — BISHOP HOADLEY — THEODOSIA 
WOODWARD — THE ORIGIN OF THB CONNEXION OP THE 
THACKERAYS WITH INDIA — BIRTH OP THE FUTURE NOV- 
ELIST — VOYAGE TO ENGLAND — RECOLLECTION OP NA- 
POLEON AT ST. HELENA — THE DEATH OP THE PRINCESS 
CHARLOTTE — HADLE Y — THE CHARTERHOUSE — PARTICU- 
LARS OP HIS CAREER THERE — CAMBRIDGE — CONDUCTS 
"the snob," a CAMBRIDGE FACETIOUS MAGAZINE — 
SPECIMENS OP HIS EARLY CONTRIBUTIONS TO " THE 
snob" — TENNYSON AND JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE — SO- 
JOURN AT WEIMAR — RECOLLECTIONS OP GOETHE — VISIT 
TO ROME — DESTINED FOR THE BAR — ART-STUDIES IN 
PARIS — FRIENDSHIP FOR LOUIS MARVY — THACKERAY'S 
CRITICISMS ON THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 

The fondness of Mr. Thackeray for lingering 
amidst the scenes of a boy's daily life in a public 
grammar school, has generally been attributed to 
1 



Thackeray / the Humourist 



his early education at the Charterhouse, that 
celebrated monastic-looking establishment in the 
neighbourhood of Smithfield, which he scarce- 
ly disguised from his readers as the original 
of the familiar " Grey Friars " of his works of 
fiction. Most of our novelists have given us in 
various forms their school reminiscences ; but 
none have reproduced them so frequently, or 
dwelt upon them with such manifest bias towards 
the subject, as the author of " Yanity Fair," 
" The iJ^ewcomes," and '^ The Adventures of 
Philip." It is pleasing to think that this habit, 
which Mr. Tliackeray was well aware had been 
frequently censured by his critics as carried to 
excess, was, like his partiality for the times of 
Queen Anne and the Georges, in some degree 
due to the traditional reverence of his family 
for the memory of their great-grandfather. Dr. 
Thomas Thackeray, the well-remembered head- 
master of Harrow. No memoir of William 
Makepeace Thackeray should begin with any 
other name than that of this excellent man, 
who was in every sense the founder of his family. 
If the evil which men do finds its unhappy conse- 



and the Man of Letters. 3 

quences in the generations that come after, it is 
no less true that the life henl acta, sows seeds of 
good of which none can foretell the final fruit. 
It would not, perhaps, be " considering too 
curiously," to trace something of the success of 
his great descendant to that meritorious life of 
studious industry which secured to the good 
doctor's family the means of giving to their 
children, and through them to their children's 
children, the benefits of culture and good habits. 
The memory of Dr. Thomas Thackeray is still 
held in honour at Harrow among those of the 
masters who have most contributed to raise the 
school to the high character it has long enjoyed. 
The Thackerays came originally from Hamps- 
thwaite, near Knaresborough, in the West Riding 
of Yorkshire. In this little village Dr. Thomas, 
the future head-master of Harrow, was born. Of 
the position in life of the Thackeray family at 
Hampsthwaite we are not able to give any account ; 
but it is probable that they were of humble means. 
At all events, Thomas was admitted on the founda- 
tion to Eton, from which school he was elected to 
a scholarship at King's College, Cambridge, in 



Tliackeray / the Humourist 



1711. The Yorkshire lad took degrees and reaped 
honours rapidly. He was A.B. in 1715, and A.M. 
in 1719. Subsequently he returned as assistant- 
master to the school to which he owed his early 
education, and was a candidate for the provostship 
of King's College in 1744, when Dr. George was 
elected. Dr. Thackeray, however, was in most 
things a fortunate man. In 1746 he succeeded 
to the head-mastership of Harrow, where he soon 
made powerful friends. The renown of the school 
rapidly increased under his rule. He obtained 
several livings, became Archdeacon of SuiTey, and 
was appointed chaplain to Frederick, Prince of 
Wales, the dull and despicable father of George 
III., whom the author of the '^ Lectures on the 
Four Georges " sketches with so strong a hand. 
Dr. Edmund Pyle, of Lynn, in a letter dated 1756, 
gives some interesting particulars of the Master of 
Harrow's history. He says : " Dr. Thackeray, 
who keeps a school at Harrow-on-the-Hill, has 
one living and fourteen children : a man bred at 
Eton, and a great scholar in the Eton way, and a 
good one every way ; a true Whig, and proud to 
be so by some special marks of integrity. He 



cmd the Man of Letters, 



was candidate for the headship of King's, and 
would have beat all men but George, and George 
too, if Sir Robert Walpole had not made George's 
promotion a point. Since this disappointment he 
took the school at HaiTow, to educate his own and 
other people's children, where he has performed 
all along with great reputation. The Bishop of 
Winchester never saw this man in his life, but had 
heard so much good of him, that he resolved to 
serve him some way or other if ever he could, but 
said nothing to anybody. On Friday last, he 
sent for this Dr. Thackeray, and when he came 
into the room my Lord gave him a parchment, 
and told him he had long heard of his good cha- 
racter, and long been afraid he should never be 
able to give him any serviceable proof of the 
good opinion he had conceived of him : that what 
he had put into his hands was the Archdeaconry 
of Surrey, which he hoped would be acceptable to 
him, as he might perform the duty of it yearly at 
the time of his leisure in the Easter holidays. Dr. 
Thackeray was so surprised and overcome with 
this extraordinary manner of doing him a favour, 
that he was very near fainting as he was giving 



6 Thackercmj / the Htimourist 

him institution."* This Bishop was the cele- 
brated Iloadley, if we are not mistaken ; but Mr. 
Thackeray could hardly have been aware of this 
family anecdote when, in his " Lectures on tlie 
Four Georges," he somewhat harshly described 
this unlucky mark for the controversial pamph- 
leteers of his time as " creeping from bishopric to 
bishopric." Dr. Thackeray's death is announced 
in the " Gentleman's Magazine " for October, 
1760. His widow survived him nearly half a cen- 
tury, and died in January, 1797, in her 90th year. 
The Doctor had doubtless courted and won her at 
Eton, in the early days of his studious life. She 
was Theodosia, the daughter of John Woodward, 
Esq., of that town and of Butler's Merston, an- 
other of whose daughters married Dr. Nicholas 
Boscawen, Canon of Windsor. Theodosia bore 
the Doctor six sons and ten daughters, one of 
whom, the Eev. Elias Thackeray, was Yice-Pro- 
vost and Bursar of King's College, Cambridge ; 
another son was chaplain at St. Petersburg ; 
another held an appointment in the Custom- 
house for forty years ; and two became Doctors 

* Richards's " History of Lynu." 1813. 



cmd the Man of Letters, 



of Medicine, and settled at Cambridge and 
Windsor. 

The marriages of two of tlie daughters seem 
to have laid the fonndation of the connexion of 
the Thackerays with India. Jane married Major 
Rennell of the East India Company's Service, and 
Surveyor-General of Bengal ; and Henrietta, 
James Harris, Esq., of the East India Company's 
Civil Service, and chief of Dacca. The grand- 
father of the author of " Yanity Fair " was the 
youngest son of this large family. He was 
christened, for what reason we do not know, 
William Makepeace ; and it was doubtless by the 
interest of his sisters' husbands that he also ob- 
tained an appointment in the East India Com- 
pany's Service. William Makepeace married a 
Miss Webb,* and subsequently retired to England 
with a competency, leaving behind him his son, 
Richmond Thackeray, to follow the same career. 
Richmond obtained a writership in 1797, and suc- 

* Mr. Hannay tells us that this lady was of the old 
English family to which the Brigadier Webb of Marl- 
borough's wars belonged, whose portrait is drawn with 
something of the geniality of kinsmanship in " Esmond." 



Thackeray / the Humourist 



cessively officiated as Judge and Magistrate of 
Ranghyr, Secretary to the Board of Revenue at 
Calcutta, and Collector of the House Tax at Cal- 
cutta. Here Ms son, William Makepeace, the 
future novelist, was horn in 1811 — the year be- 
fore that which gave to the world his illustrious 
contemporary and fellow-labourer in the field of 
fiction — Charles Dickens. Mr. Thackeray's father 
died in Calcutta on the 13th of September, 1815, 
the very year of the battle of Waterloo, the his- 
tory of which is so wonderfully interwoven with 
the story of " Yanity Fair." The son, after re- 
maining in India for some time with his widowed 
mother, finally bade adieu forever to that country, 
and was brought to England in 1817. His mother, 
who had subsequently married Major Carmichael 
Smyth, still survives, a lady of more than 
eighty years of age, whose vigorous health and 
cheerful spirits are proverbial in her son's 
family. 



Sketches of Indian life and Anglo-Indians 
generally are abundantly interspersed through 
Mr. Thackeray's writings, but he left India too 
early to have profited much by Indian experi- 



and the Mam of Letters, 9 

ences. He is said, however, to have retained so 
strong an impression of the scene of his earlj 
childhood, as to have long wished to visit it, and 
recal such things as were still renaembered by 
liim. In his seventh year he was sent to England, 
when the ship having tonched at St. Helena, he 
was taken up to have a glimpse of Bowood, and 
there saw that great Captain at whose name the 
rulers of the earth had so often trembled. It is 
remarkable that in his little account of the second 
funeral of Napoleon, which he witnessed in Paris 
in 1840, no allusion to this fact appears y but he 
himself has described it in one of his latest works. 
'' When I first saw England," he says, " she was 
in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte,"^ 
the hope of the empire. I came from India as a 
child, and our ship touched at an island on our 
way home, where my black servant took me a 
long walk over rocks and hills, until we reached a 
garden where we saw a man walking. ^ That 
is he I ' cried the black man ; ^ that is Bona- 
parte ! He eats three sheep every day, and all 
the children he can lay hands on ! ' With the 

* The Princess Charlotte died 6 Nov. 1817. 
1* 



10 Thackeray / the Hwmourist 

same childisli attendant," he adds, " I remember 
peeping through the colonnade at Carlton House, 
and seeing the abode of the Prince Regent. I can 
yet see the guards pacing before the gates of the 
palace. The palace I "What palace ? The palace 
exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnez- 
zar. It is but a name now." * 

We fancy that Mr. Thackeray was placed 
under the protection of his grandfather, William 
Makepeace Thackeray, who had settled with a 
good fortune, the fruit of his industry in India, 
at Hadley, near Chipping Barnet, a little village 
in the churchyard of which lies buried the once- 
read Mrs. Chapone, the authoress of the " Letters 
on the Improvement of the Mind," the ' corre- 
spondent of Richardson, and the intimate friend 
of the learned Mrs. Carter and other blue-stocking 
ladies of that time. 

In the course of time — we believe in his twelfth 
year — Mr. Thackeray was sent to the Charter- 
house School, and remained there as a boarder 
in the house of Mr. Penny. He appears in the 
Charterhouse records for the year 1822 as a boy 

* " The Four Georges," p. 111. 



cmd the Man of Letters, 11 

on the tenth form. In the next year we find him 
promoted to the seventh form ; in 1824 to the 
fifth ; and in 1828, when he had become a day- 
boy, or one residing with his friends, we find him 
in the honourable positions of a first-form boy and 
one of the monitors of the school. He was, how- 
ever, never chosen as one of the orators, or those 
who speak the oration on the Founder's Day, nor 
does he appear among the writers of the Charter- 
house odes, which have been collected and printed 
from time to time in a small volume. The 
school then enjoyed considerable reputation under 
the head-mastership of Dr. Russell, whose death 
happened in the same year as that of his illustrious 
pupil. ]^o one who has read Mr. Thackeray's 
novels can fail to know the kind of life he led 
here. He has continually described his expe- 
riences at this celebrated school — the venerable 
archway into which, in Charterhouse-square, still 
preserves an interesting token of the old monkish 
character of the neighbourhood. Only a fort- 
night before his death he was there again, as was 
his custom, on the anniversary of the death of 
Thomas Sntton, the mimificent founder of the 



12 Thackeray / the Humov/rist 

school. " He was there," sajs one who has de- 
scribed the scene, " in his usual back seat in the 
quaint old chapel. He went thence to the 
oration in the Governor's room ; and as he 
walked up to the orator with his contribution, 
was received with such heartj applause as only 
Carthusians can give to one who has immortalized 
their school. At the banquet afterwards he sat 
at the side of his old friend and artist-associate 
in ' Punch,' John Leech ; and in a humourous 
speech proposed, as a toast, the noble founda- 
tion which he had adorned by his literary fame, 
and made popular in his works." " Divine ser- 
vice," says another describer of the scene, for 
ever memorable as the last appearance of Mr. 
Thackeray in private life, " took place at four 
o'clock, in the quaint old chapel ; and the appear- 
ance of the brethren in their black gowns, of the 
old stained glass and carving in the chapel, of the 
tomb of Sutton, could hardly fail to give a 
peculiar and interesting character to the service. 
Prayers were said by the Pev. J. J. Halcombe, 
the reader of the house. There was only the 
usual parochial chanting of the JSfxmc Dim litis ^ 



cmd the Man of Letters. 13 

the familiar Commemoration-day psalms, 122 
and 100, were sung after the third collect and 
before the sermon ; and before the general thanks- 
giving the old prayer was offered up expressive of 
thankfulness to God for the bounty of Thomas 
Sutton, and of hope that all who enjoy it might 
make a right use of it. The sermon was preached 
by the Rev. Henry Earle Tweed, late Fellow of 
Oriel College, Oxford, who prefaced it with the 
* Bidding Prayer,' in which he desired. the con- 
gregation to pray generally for all public schools 
and colleges, and particularly for the welfare of 
the house * founded by Thomas Sutton for the 
support of age and the education of youth.' " 

From Charterhouse School Thackeray went 
to Trinity College, Cambridge, about 1828, the 
year of his leaving the Charterhouse, and 
among his fellow-students there, had Mr. John 
Mitchell Kemble, the great Anglo-Saxon scholar, 
and Mr. Tennyson. With the latter — then un- 
known as a poet — he formed an acquaintance 
which he maintained to the last, and no reader of 
the Poet-laureate had a more earnest admiration 
of his productions than his old Cambridge associate 



14 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Mr. Thackeray. At college, Thackeray kept seven 
or eight terms, but took no degree ; though he 
was studious, and his love of classical literature is 
apparent in most of his writings, either in his 
occasional apt two words from Horace, or in the 
quaint and humorous adoption of Latin idioms in 
which, in his sportive moods, he sometimes in- 
dulged. A recent writer tells us that his knowledge 
of the classics — of Horace at least — was amply 
sufficient to procure him an honourable place in 
the " previous examination." 

The earliest of his literary efforts are associated 
with Cambridge. It was in the year 1829 that 
he commenced, in conjunction with a friend 
and fellow-student, to edit a series of humorous 
papers, published in that city, which bore the 
title of " The Snob : a Literary and Scientific 
Journal." The first number appeared on the 9th 
of April in that year, and the publication was 
continued weekly. Though affecting to be a 
periodical, it was not originally intended to 
publish more than one number ; but the project 
was carried on for eleven weeks, in which period 
Mr. Lettsom had resigned the entire management 



and the Man of Letters. 15 

to liis friend. The contents of each number — 
which consisted only of four pages of about 
the gize of those of the present volume — were 
scanty and slight, and consisted entirely of squibs 
and humorous sketches in verse and prose, many 
of which, however, show some germs of that 
spirit of wild fun which afterwards distinguished 
the " Yellowplush " papers in " Eraser." "When 
completed, the papers bore the following title : — 

THE SNOB: 

A LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL. 

NOT 



** Conducted By Members of the University." 



Tityre^ tu patulm recubans sub tegminefagi 
Sylvestrem. Vikgil. 



([Tatnbribge : 

rUBLISHED BT W. H. SMITH, 
ROSE CRESCENT. 

1829. 



16 ThackeroAj y the Humxni/rist 

A few specimens of the contents of this curious 
publication cannot but be interesting to the 
readei\ The first specimen we shall select is a 
clever skit upon the Cambridge Prize Poem, as 
follows : 

TIMBUCTOO. 

TO TEDS EDITOR OP THE " SNOB," 

Sir, — Though your name be " Snob," I trust you 
will not refuse this tiny " Poem of a Gownsman,'' 
which was unluckily not finished on the day appointed 
for delivery of the several copies of verses on Timbuc- 
too. I thought, Sir, it would be a pity that such a 
poem should be lost to the world ; and conceiving 
" The Snob " to be the most widely-cii'culated periodical 
in Europe, I have taken the liberty of submitting it for 
insertion or approbation. 

I am, Sir, yours, &c. &c. &c. 

TIMBUCTOO. — PART I. 

Tlie Situation. 
In Africa (a quarter of the world), 
Men's skins are black, their hair is crisp and curl'd. 

Lines 1 and 2. — See Guthrie's Geography. 

The site of Timbuctoo is doubtful ; the Author has 
neatly expressed this in the poem, at the same time 
giving us some slight hints relative to its situation. 



and the Man of Letters. it 



And somewhere there, unknown to public view, 
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo. 

The natural history. 

There stalks the tiger, — there the lion roars, , 5 

Who sometimes eats the luckless blackamoors ; 
All that he leaves of them the monster throws 
To jackals, vultures, dogs, cats, kites, and crows ; 
His hunger thus the forest monster gluts, 
And then lies down 'neath trees called cocoa nuts. 10 

The lion hunt. 

Quick issue out, with musket, torch, and brand, 
The sturdy blackamoors, a dusky band ! 
The beast is found — pop goes the musketoons — 
The lion falls covered with horrid wounds. 

Line 5. — So Horace : " leonum arida nutrix.''^ 
Line 8. — Thus Apollo : 

fXtupm revx^c Kvvecrcriv 
Oifopoiai re nacri. 

Lines 5-10. — How skilfully introduced are the ani- 
mal and vegetable productions of Africa I It is worthy 
to remark the various garments in which the Poet hath 
clothed the lion. He is called, 1st, the " Lion ; " 2nd, 
the " Monster " (for he is very large) ; and 3rd, the 
" Forest Monarch," which undoubtedly he is. 

Lines 11-14. — The author confessed himself under 
peculiar obligations to Denham's and Clapperton's Trav- 
els, as they suggested to him the spirited description con- 
tained in these lines. 

Line 13. — "Pop goes the musketoons." A learned 



18 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Their lives at hoine. 

At home their lives in pleasure always flow, 15 

But many have a different lot to know ! 
Abroad. 
They're often caught, and sold as slaves, alas I 

Beflectiona on the foregoing. 
Thus men from highest joys to sorrow pass. 
Yet though thy monarchs and thy nobles boil 
Rack and molasses in Jamaica's isle ; 20 

Desolate Afric 1 thou art lovely yet ! ! 
One heart yet beats which ne'er thee shall forget. 
What though thy maidens are a blackish brown, 
Does virtue dwell in whiter breasts alone ? 
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no I - 25 

It shall not, must not, cannot, e'er be so. 
The day shall come when Albion's self shall feel 
Stern Afric's wrath, and writhe 'neath Afric's steel. 
I see her tribes the hill of glory mount, 
And sell their sugars on their own account. 30 

While round her throne the prostrate nations come. 
Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum ! 32 

friend suggested " Bang " as a stronger expression, but 
as African gunpowder is notoriously bad, the Author 
thought " Pop " the better word. 

Lines 15-18. — A concise but affecting description is 
here given of the domestic habits of the people. The 
infamous manner in which they are entrapped and sold 
as slaves is described, and the whole ends with an 
appropriate moral sentiment. The Poem might here 
finish, but the spirit of the bard penetrates the veil of 



and the Mem of Letters. 19 

This concludes with a like vignette in the " Tit- 
marsh " manner, representing an Indian smoking 
a pipe of the type once commonly seen in the 

futurity, and from it cuts off a bright piece for tlie 
hitherto unfortunate Africans, as the following beautiful 
lines amply exemj)lify. 

It may perhaps be remarked that the Author has here 
" changed his hand." He answers that it was his inten- 
tion to do so. Before, it was his endeavour to be ele- 
gant and concise, it is now his wish to be enthusiastic 
and magnificent. He trusts the Reader will perceive 
the aptness with which he has changed his style ; when 
he narrated facts he was calm, when he enters on prophecy 
he is fervid. 

The enthusiasm which he feels is beautifully expressed 
in lines 25 and 36. He thinks he has very successfully 
imitated in tbe last six lines the best manner of IVIr. Pope ; 
and in Unes 12-26, the pathetic elegance of the author of 
" Australasia and Athens." 

The Author cannot conclude without declaring that 
his aim in writing this Poem will be fully accomplished, 
if he can infuse into the breasts of Englishmen a sense 
of the danger in which they lie. Yes — Africa I K he 
can awaken one particle of sympathy for thy sorrows, of 
love for thy land, of admiration for thy virtue, he shall 
sink into the grave with the proud consciousness that 
he has raised esteem, where before there was contempt, 
and has kindled the flame of hope on the mouldering 
ashes of despair ! 



20 Thackeray / the Humourist 

shape of a email carved image at the doors of 
tobacconists' shops. In another paper we find 
the following pretended 

ADVERTISEMENT. 

This clay is published, price 3s. 6^., "An Essay on 
the Great Toe," together with the nature and proper- 
ties of Toes in general, with many sagacious inquiries 
why the Great Toes are bigger than the Little, and 
why the Little are less than the Great. Proving also 
that Gout is not the Dropsy, and that a Gentleman 
may have a swelled Face without a pain in his Back. 
Also a Postscript to establish that a Chilblain is very 
unlike a Lock-jaw. Translated from the original 
Chaldee. 

N.B. A few light summer lectures on Phrenology to be 
disposed of; enquire of Mr. Smith. 

A little further we come upon an exercise in 

Malapropisms,* under the form of a letter from 

Mrs. 

RAMSBOTTOM IN CAMBRIDGE. 

Badish Chround Buildings. — Dear Sir, — I was sur- 
prized to see my name in Mr. Bull's paper, for I give 
you my word I have not written a syllabiib to him since 
I came to reside here, that I might enjoy the satiety of the 
literary and learned world. 

* Signed " Dorothea Julia Ramsbottom," after Theodore 
Hook's " Paris Correspondent." 



and the Man of Letters, SI 



I have the honour of knowing many extinguished 
persons. I am on terms of the greatest contumacy 
with the Court of Aldermen, who first recommended 
your weekly dromedary to my notice, knowing that I 
myself was a great literati. When I am at home, I 
make Lavy read it to me, as I consider you the censure 
of the anniversary, and a great upholder of moral de- 
struction. 

When I came here, I began reading Mechanics (writ- 
ten by that gentleman whose name you whistle). I 
thought it would be something like the "Mechanics' 
Magazine," which my poor dear Ram used to make me 
read to him, but I found them very foolish. What do 
I want td know about weights and measures and bull's 
eyes, when I have left off trading. I have, therefore, 
begun a course of ugly physics, which are very odd, and 
written by the Marquis of Spinningtoes. 

I think the Library of Trinity College is one of the 
most admirable objects here. I saw the busks of several 
gentlemen whose statutes I had seen at Room, and who 
all received their edification at that College. There 
was Aristocracy who wrote farces for the Olympic 
Theatre, and Democracy who was a laughing philo- 
sophy. 

I forgot to mention that my son George Frederick 
is entered at St. John's, because I heard that they take 
most care of their morals at that College. I called on 
the tutor, who received myself and son very politely, 
and said he had no doubt my son would be a tripod, 
and he hoped perspired higher than poUy, which I did 



22 Thackeray / the Huinourist 

not like. I am going to give a tea at my house, when 
I shall be delighted to see yourself and children. 
Believe me, dear Sir, 

Your most obedient and affectionate, 

Dorothea Julia Eamsbottom. 

Further still, we have an example of droll 
errors in orthography similar to those in which 
Thackeray afterwards learned to revel in the 
characters of " Yellowplush," and " Jeames of 

Buckley Square." This is entitled : — 

« 

A STATEMENT OF FAX RELATIVE TO THE 
LATE MURDER. 

By D. J. Ramsbottom. 



" Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral." 

Milton. Julius Ccesar^ Act hi. 



On Wednesday, the 3rd of June, as I was sitting in 
my back parlour taking tea, young Frederick Tudge 
entered the room ; I reserved from his dislevelled hair 
and vegetated appearance, that something was praying 
on his vittels. When I heard from him the cause of 
his vegetation, I was putrified 1 I stood transfigured ! 
His father, the editor of "The Snob," had been mace- 



and the Man of Letters, 23 



rated in tlie most sanguine manner. The drops of 
compassion refused my eyes, for I thouglit of him 
whom I had lately seen high in health and happiness, 
that ingenuous indivisable, who often and often when 
seated alone with me has " made the Table roar," as 
the poet has it, and whose constant aim in his weakly 
dromedary, was to delight as well as to reprove. His 
son Frederick, too young to be acquainted with the 
art of literal imposition, has commissioned me to excom- 
municate the circumstances of his death, and call down 
the anger of the Proctors and Court of Aldermen on the 
phlogitious perforators of the deed. 

It appears he was taking his customary rendezvous 
by the side of Trumpington Ditch, he was stopped by 
some men in under-gravy dresses, who put a pitch- 
plaister on him, which completely developed his nose 
and eyes, or, as Shakspeare says, "his visible ray." 
He was then dragged into a field, and the horrid deed 
was replete ! Such are the circumstances of his 
death; but Mr. Tudge died like Wriggle-us, game to 
the last ; or like Caesar in that beautiful faction of the 
poet, with which I have headed my remarks, I mean 
him who wanted to be Poop of Room, but was killed 
by two Brutes, and the fascinating hands of a perspiring 
Senate. 

With the most sanguinary hopes that the Anniver- 
sary and Town will persecute an inquiry into this 
dreadful action, I will conclude my repeal to the 
pathetic reader; and if by such a misrepresentation 
of fax, I have been enabled to awaken an apathy for 
the children of the late Mr. Tudge, who are left in 



24 Thackeray / the Humourist 

the most desultory state, I shall feel the satisfaction of 
having exorcised my pen in the cause of Malevolence, 
and soothed the inflictions of indignant Misery. 

D. J. Ramsbottom. 

P.S. The Publisher requests me to state that the 
present Number is published from the MS. found in 
Mr. Tudge's pocket, and one more number will be soon 
forthcoming, containing his inhuman papers. 

About 1831 he repaired to Weimar in Saxony, 
where, as lie describes it, lie lived with a score of 
young English lads, " for study, or sport, or so- 
ciety." Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his " Life of Goethe," 
tells us that Weimar albums still display with pride 
the caricatures which the young artist sketched at 
that period. " My delight in those days " (says 
Mr. Thackeray), " was to make caricatures for 
children," a habit, we may add, which he never 
forgot. Years afterwards, in the fulness of his 
fame, revisiting the " friendly little Saxon capital," 
he found, to his great delight, that these were 
yet remembered, and some even preserved still ; 
but he was much more proud to be told, as a lad, 
that the great Goethe himself had looked at some 
of them. Li a letter to his friend Mr. Lewes, in- 
serted by the latter in the work referred to, Mr. 



cmd the Man of Letters, 23 

Thackeray has given a pleasing picture of this 
period of his life, and of the society in which he 
found himself. The Grand Duke and Duchess (he 
tells us) received the English lads with the kind- 
liest hospitality. The court was splendid, but 
yet most pleasant and homely. They were in- 
vited in turns to dinners, balls, and assemblies 
there. Such young men as had a right appeared 
in uniforms, diplomatic and military. Some in- 
vented gorgeous clothing : the old Hof Marschall, 
M. de Spiegel, who (says Mr. Thackeray) had two 
of the most lovely daughters ever looked on, 
being in nowise difficult as to the admission of 
these young Englanders. Of the winter nights 
they used to charter sedan chairs, in which they 
were carried through the snow to these court 
entertainments. Here young Thackeray had the 
good luck to purchase Schiller's sword, which 
formed a part of his court costume, and which 
hung in his study till the day of his death, to put 
him (as he said) in mind of days of youth the 
most kindly and delightful. 

Here, too, he had the advantage of the society 
of his friend and fellow-student at Cambridge 
2 



36 Thackeray ; the Humcmrist 

Mr. "W. G. Lettsom, at present Hei' Majesty's 
Charge d' Affaires at Uruguay, but who was at the 
period referred to attached to the suite of the 
English Minister at Weimar. To the kindness 
of this gentleman he was indebted in a consid- 
erable degree for the introductions he obtained 
to the best families in the* town. Mr. Thackeray 
was always fond of referring to this period of 
his life. In a private letter written long after- 
wards, speaking of one of Turner's pictures, 
he says : — " I recollect, many years ago, at 
the theatre at Weimar, hearing Beethoven's 
* Battle of Yittoria,' in which, amidst a storm of 
glorious music, the air of ' God save the King ' 
vsras introduced. The very instant it begun every 
Englishman in the theatre stood upright, and so 
stood reverently until the air was finished. Why 
so ? From some such tlirill of excitement as 
makes us glow and rejoice over Mr. Turner and 
his ' Fighting Temeraire.' " 

Devrient, who appeared some years since at the 
St. James's Theatre in German versions of Shak- 
speare, was performing at Weimar at that period ; 
and Madame Schroder Devrient was appearing in 



and the Man of Letters. 27 

Fidelio, In frequenting tlie performances at the 
theatres, or attending the levees of the Court 
ladies, the young students spent their evenings. 
" After three and twenty years' absence " (contin- 
ues Mr. Thackeray) " I passed a couple of summer 
days in the well-remembered place, and was for- 
tunate enough to find some of the friends of my 
youth. Madame de Goethe was there, and re- 
ceived me and my daughters with the kindness 
of old days. We drank tea in the open air at 
the famous cottage in the park, which still be- 
longs to the family, and had been so often in- 
habited by her illustrious father. In 1831, 
though he had retired from the world, Goethe 
would nevertheless very kindly receive strangers. 
His daughter-in-law's tea-table was always spread 
for us. "We passed hours after hours there, and 
night after night with the pleasantest talk and 
music. We read over endless novels and poems 
in French, English, and German. ^ * * 
He remained in his private apartment, where only 
a very few privileged persons were admitted ; but 
he liked to know all that was happening, and 
interested himself about all strangers. * * * 



28 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Of course I remember very well the perturba- 
tion of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, 
I received the long-expected intimation that 
the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such 
a morning. This notable audience took place in 
a little ante-chamber of his private apartments, 
covered all round with antique casts and bas-reliefs. 
He was habited in a long grey or drab redingote, 
with a white neckcloth and a red riband in his 
buttonhole. He kept his hands behind his back, 
just as in Kauch's statuette. His complexion 
was very bright, clear, and rosy ; his eyes ex- 
traordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt 
quite afraid before them, and recollect comparing 
them to the eyes of the hero of a certain romance 
called ' Melmoth the "Wanderer,' which used to 
alarm us boys thirty years ago ; eyes of an indi- 
vidual who had made a bargain with a certain per- 
son, and at an extreme old age retained these eyes 
in all their awful splendour. I fancied Goethe 
must have been still more handsome as an old man 
than even in the days of his youth. His voice 
was very rich and sweet. He asked me questions 
about myself, which I answered as best I could. 



a/nd the Man of Letters, 29 

I recollect I was at first astonished, and then 
somewhat relieved, when I found he spoke French 
with not a good accent. Yidi tantum. I saw 
him but three times. Once walking in the gar- 
den of his house in the Frauenplan ; once going to 
step into his chariot on a sunshiny day, wearing 
a cap, and a cloak with a red collar. He was 
caressing at the time a beautiful little golden- 
haired granddaughter, over whose sweet fair face 
the earth has long since closed too. IVIany of us 
who had books or magazines from England sent 
them to him, and he examined them eagerly. 
' Fraser's Magazine ' had lately come out, and I 
remember he was interested in those admirable 
outline portraits which appeared for a while in its 
pages. But there was one, a very ghastly carica- 
ture of Mr. K ,* which, as Madame de Goethe 

told me, he shut up and put away from him 
angrily. ' They would make me look like that,' 
he said ; though in truth I can fancy nothing 
more serene, majestic, and healthy-\o6kmg than 
the grand old Goethe. Though his sun was 
setting, the sky round about was calm and bright, 

* Samuel Kogers, the poet. 



30 Tliackera/y / the Humourist 

and that little Weimar illumined by it. In 
every one of those kind salons the talk was still 
of art and letters. * 4^- * * 

At court the conversation was exceedingly 
friendly, simple, and polished. The Grand 
Dachess (the present Grand Duchess Dowager), 
a lady of very remarkable endowments, would 
kindly borrow our books from us, lend us 
her own, and graciously talk to us young men 
about our literary tastes and pursuits. In the 
respect paid by this court to the patriarch of 
letters there was something ennobling, I think, 
alike to the subject and sovereign. With a five- 
and-twenty years' experience since those happy 
days of which I write (says Mr. Thackeray) and 
an acquaintance with an immense variety of 
human kind, I think I have never seen a society 
more simple, charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike, 
than that of the dear little Saxon city where the 
good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie 
buried." * 

The Weimar reminiscences show how early 

* The whole of this long and beautiful letter may be 
read in Mr. Lewes's biograf)hy of " the Great Goethe," a 
cheap edition of which has just been published. 



OMd the Man of Letters. 31 

his passion for art liacl developed itself. One 
wlio knew liim well affirms that he was 
originally intended for the bar ; but he had, 
indeed, already determined to be an artist, and 
for a considerable period he diligently followed 
his bent. He visited Rome, where he stayed some 
time, and subsequently, as we shall see, settled for 
a considerable time in Paris, where, says a writer 
in the " Edinburgh Review " for January, 1848, 
" we well remember, ten or twelve years ago, 
finding him, day after day, engaged in copying 
pictures in the Louvre, in order to qualify him- 
self for his intended profession. It may be 
doubted, however," adds this writer, " whether 
any degree of assiduity would have enabled him 
to excel in the money-making branches, for his 
talent was altogether of the Hogarth kind, and 
was principally remarkable in the pen-and-ink 
sketches of character and situation which he 
dashed off for the amusement of his friends." 
This is just criticism ; but Thackeray, though 
caring little himself for the graces of good 
drawing or correct anatomy, had a keen appre- 
ciation of the beauties of his contemporary 



32 Thackeray ; the Humourist 



artists. Years after — in 1848 — when, as he says, 
the revolutionary storm which raged in France 
" drove many peaceful artists, as well as kings, 
ministers, tribunes, and socialists of state for 
refuge to our country," an artist friend of his 
early Paris life found his way to Thackeray's 
home in London. This was Monsieur Louis 
Marvy, in whose atelier the former had passed 
many happy hours with the family of the French 
artist — in that constant cheerfulness and sun- 
shine, as his English friend expressed it, which 
the Parisian was now obliged to exchange for a 
dingy parlour and the fog and solitude of London. 
A fine and skilful landscape painter himself, M. 
Marvy, while here, as a means of eaming a living, 
made a series of engravings after the works of our 
English landscape painters. For some of these his 
friend obtained for M. Marvy permission to take 
copies in the valuable private collection of Mr. 
Thomas Baring. The publishers, however, would 
not undertake the work without a series of letter- 
press notices of each picture from Mr. Thackeray ; 
and the latter accordingly added some criticisms 
which are interesting as developing his theory of 



and the Man of Letters. 33 

this kind of art. The artists whose works are en- 
graved are Calcott, Turner, Holland, Danbj, Cres- 
wick, Collins, Redgrave, Lee, Cattermole, W. J. 
Miiller, Harding, l^asmjth, Wilson, E. "W. Cooke, 
Constable, De Wint, and Gainsborough. Of 
Tui'ner he says : — " Many cannot comprehend the 
pictures themselves, but stand bewildered before 
those blazing wonders, those blood-red shadows, 
those whirling gamboge suns — awful hierogly- 
phics, which even the Oxford undergraduate 
(Mr. Ruskin), Turner's most faithful priest and 
worshipper, cannot altogether make clear. J^ay, 
who knows whether the prophet himself has any 
distinct idea of the words which break out from 
him as he sits whirling on the tripod, or of what 
spirits will come up as he waves his wand and de- 
livers his astounding incantation ? It is not given 
to all to understand ; but at times we have glimp- 
ses of comprehension, and in looking at such pic- 
tures as the ' Fighting Temeraire ' for instance, 
or the * Star Ship,' we admire, and can scarce 
find words adequate to express our wonder at the 
stupendous skill and genius of this astonishing 
master. If those words which we think we un- 
2* 



84 Thackeray ; the Humourist 



derstand are sublime, what are those others which 
are unintelligible? Are they sublime too, or 
have they reached that next and higher step 
which by some is denominated ridiculous ! Per- 
haps we have not arrived at the right period for 
judging, and Time, which is proverbial for settling 
quarrels, is also required for sobering pictures." 
Of Danby he says, " His pictures are always 
still. You stand before them alone, and with a 
hushed admiration, as before a great landscape 
when it breaks on your view." On Constable's 
well-known picture of the Cornfield in the 
National Gallery he says : " The beautiful piece 
of autumn appears to be under the influence of a 
late shower. The shrubs, trees, and distance are 
saturated with it. What a lover of water that 
youngster must be who is filling himself within 
after he has been wetted to the skin by the rain 
which has just passed away. As one looks at 
this delightful picture one cannot but admire the 
manner in which the specific character of every 
object is made out : the undulations of the ripe 
corn, the chequered light on the road, the fresh- 
ness of the banks, the trees and their leafage, the 



and the Man of Letters. 35 

brilliant cloud, awfully contrasting against the 
trees, and here and there broken with azure." 
Such were the opinions of the author of the 
grotesque illustrations of " Yanity Fair " and 
" Pendennis " upon those great landscape painters 
of whom England is proud — opinions which show 
at least a warm sympathy with that higher order 
of art in which he had failed to achieve a satis- 
factory degree of success. 




Facsimile of the little vignette in the Cambridge " Snob.'' 
See dbove^page 19. 



36 Thackeray / the Humourist 



CHAPTEK II. 

EARLY CONNEXION WITH FRASER's MAGAZINE — RESIDENCE 
IN ALBION-STREET — FONDNESS FOR PARIS LIFE — ANEC- 
DOTE OF A VISIT TO THAT CITY WHEN A BOY — THE 
QUARTIER LATIN — KINDNESS TO OLD ACQUAINTANCES 
IN PARIS — ANECDOTES OF SUBSEQUENT YISITS TO 
FRANCE — DISLIKE OF FRENCH INSTITUTIONS — THE 
PARADISE OF YOUNG PAINTERS — HIS ACCOUNT OP ART- 
STUDENT LIFE IN PARIS — OPINIONS ON THE FRENCH 
SCHOOL OF PAINTING — GROWING LOVE OP AUTHORSHIP 
— ^PICKWICK — MACAULAY — EARLY OPINIONS ON THE OLD 
NOVELISTS — PREFERENCE FOR NOVELS OVER HISTORY — 
MAGINN AND " FRASER'S MAGAZINE" — MACLISE's PIC- 
TURE OP THE FRASERIANS IN 1834 — FATHER PROUT — 
ORIGIN OP THE YELLOWPLUSH IDEA. 

It was, we believe, in 1834, and while residing 
for a short period in Albion-street, Hyde 
Park, the residence of his mother and her second 
husband. Major Carmichael Smyth, that Mr. 



and the Man of Letters. 3T 

Thackeray began his literary career as a contri- 
butor to " Fraser's Magazine." The pseudonims 
of " Michael Angelo Titmarsh," " Fitz Boodle," 
" Yellowplush," or " Lancelot Wagstaff," under 
which he afterwards amused the readers of the 
periodicals, had not then been thought of. His 
early papers were chiefly relating to the Fine Arts ; 
but most of them had some reference to his French 
experiences. He seems to have had a peculiar fan- 
cy for Paris, where he resided, with brief intervals, 
for some years after coming of age, and where 
most of his magazine papers were written. In 
one of those delightful essays in which he makes 
his reader the confidants of his personal remi- 
niscences, he has given us an amusing anecdote 
of his first furtive trip to that capital. He tells us 
how, when a lad of nineteen, he found himself 
one day at a certain inn in Dover, whose exorbi- 
tant charges he more than once in his writings 
touches on for the benefit of his readers, and how, 
having paid his coach-fare to London, the bill of 
that unreasonable hostelry reduced his allowance 
so low, that a bare half-crown for the customary 
fee to coachman was all that remained. It was in 



38 Thackeray / the Humourist 

the Easter vacation of his Cambridge life, and he 
had just returned from Paris, where he had been 
without leave of his friends : an awful sense of 
guilt weighed on his mind. The possession of a 
spare twenty pounds, and the wish to see a friend 
in Paris, had proved temptations too strong to be 
resisted. But the worst part of the case was the 
fact that he had prevaricated with his College 
tutor — told him, in fact, a fib ; for, having been 
asked by him where he intended to spend his holi- 
days, he had answered with a friend in Lincoln- 
shire. Telling this anecdote more than thirty 
years afterwards, he humorously adds : " Guilt, sir 
— ^guilt always remained stamped on the memory ; 
and I feel easier in my mind now that it is libe- 
rated of this old peccadillo." 

A recent writer has given some amusing parti- 
culars of his Paris life, and his subsequent interest 
in the city, where he had many friends and was 
known to a wide circle of readers. " He lived," 
says the writer, " in Paris ' over the water,' and 
it is not long since, in strolling about the Latin 
Quarter with the best of companions, that we vis- 
ited his lodgings, Thackeray inquiring after those 



and the Man of Letters. 89 

who were already forgotten — imknowii. Those 
who may wish to learn his early Parisian life and 
associations should turn to the story of ^ Philip on 
his Way through the World.' Many incidents in 
that naiTative are reminiscences of his own youth- 
ful literary struggles whilst living modestly in 
this city. Latterly, fortune and fame enabled the 
author of ' Yanity Fair ' to visit imperial Paris in 
imperial style, and Mr. Thackeray put up gene- 
rally at the Hotel de Bristol in the Place Yen- 
dome. JS^ever was increase of fortune more 
gracefully worn or more generously employed. 
The struggling artist and small man of letters 
whom he was sure to find at home or abroad, was 
pretty safe to be assisted if he learned their wants. 
1 know of many a kind act. One morning, on 
entering Mr. Thackeray's bedroom in Paris, I 
found him placing some napoleons in a pill-box, 
on the lid of which was written, ' One to be taken 
occasionally.' ' What are you doing ? ' said I. 
* Well,' he replied, * there is an old person here 
who says she is very ill and in distress, and I 
strongly suspect that this is the sort of medicine 
she wants. Dr. Thackeray intends to leave it with 



40 Thackeray / the Hwinourist 

lier himself. Let us walk out together.' * Thack- 
eray used to say that he came to Paris for a holi- 
day and to revive his recollections of French 
cooking. But he generally worked here, espe- 
cially when editing the ' Cornhill Magazine.' " f 

Thackeray's affection for Paris, however, ap- 
pears to have been founded upon no relish for 
tlie gaieties of the French metropolis, and cer- 
tainly not upon any liking for French institutions. 
His papers on this subject are generally criticisms 
upon political, social, and literary failings of the 
French, written in a severe spirit which savours 
more of the confident judgment of youth than of 
the calm spirit of the citizen of the world. The 
reactionary rule of Louis Philippe, the Govern- 
ment of July, and the boasted charter of 1830, 
were the objects of his especial dislike ; nor was 
he less unsparing in his views of French morals 
as exemplified in their law courts, and in the nov- 
els of such writers as Madame Dudevant. The 
truth is, that at this period Paris was, in the 

* A similar story lias been told of Goldsmith, which, 
however, may have suggested the pill-box remedy in the 
instance in the text. 

t Paris Con-espondeut, Moiming Post. 



and the Man of Letter's. 41 

eyes of tlie art student, simplj the Paradise of 
young painters. Possessed of a good fortune — 
said to have amounted on his coming of age in 
1832 to £20,000 — the young Englishman passed 
his days in the Louvre, his evenings with his 
French artist acquaintances, of whom his preface 
to Louis Marvy's sketches gives so pleasant a 
glimpse ; or sometimes in his quiet lodgings in 
the Quartier Latin, in dashing off for some English 
or foreign paper his enthusiastic notices of the 
Paris Exhibition, or a criticism on French writers, 
or a story of French artist life, or an account of 
some great cause celebre then stirring the Pari- 
sian world. Tliis was doubtless the happiest 
period of his life. Li one of these papers he 
describes minutely the life of the art student in 
Paris, and records his impressions of it at the 
time. 

" To account (he says) for the superiority 
over England — which, I think, as regards art, is 
incontestable — it must be remembered that the 
painter's trade, in France, is a very good one ; 
better appreciated, better understood, and, gene- 
rally, far better paid than with us. There are 



42 Thackeray / the Huviourist 

a dozen excellent schools in wliicli a lad may 
enter here, and, under the eye of a practised 
master, learn the apprenticeship of his art at an 
expense of about ten pounds a-jear. In England 
there is no school except the ' Academy,' unless 
the student can afford to pay a very large sum, 
and place himself under the tuition of some par- 
ticular artist. Here a young man for his ten 
pounds has all sorts of accessory instruction, 
models, &c. ; and has further, and for nothing, 
numberless incitements to study his profession 
which are not to be found in England ; the 
streets are filled with picture-shops, the people 
themselves are pictures walking about ; the 
churches, theatres, eating-houses, concert-rooms, 
are covered with pictures ; Nature itself is in- 
clined more kindly to him, for the sky is a 
thousand times more bright and beautiful, and 
the sun shines for the greater part of the year. 
Add to this, incitements more selfish, but quite 
as powerful : a French artist is paid very hand- 
somely ; for five hundred a-year is much where 
all are poor ; and has a rank in society rather 
above his merits than below them, being caressed 



and the Man of Letters. 43 

by hosts and hostesses in places where titles are 
laughed at, and a baron is thought of no more 
account than a banker's clerk. 

'^ The life of the young artist here is the easiest, 
merriest, dirtiest existence possible. He comes 
to Paris, probably at sixteen, from his province ; 
his parents settle forty pounds a-year on him, 
and pay his master ; he establishes himself in 
the Pays Latin, or in the new quarter Notre 
Dame de Lorette (which is quite peopled with 
painters) ; he arrives at his atelier at a tolerably 
early hour, and labours among a score of com- 
panions as merry and poor as himself. Each 
gentleman has his favourite tobacco-pipe, and 
the pictures are painted in the midst of a cloud 
of smoke, and a din of puns and choice French 
slang, and a roar of choruses, of which no one 
can form an idea who has not been present at such 
an assembly." In another paper he discourses 
enthusiastically of the French school of painting 
as exemplified in a picture in the Exhibition by 
Carel Dujardin, as follows : — 

" A horseman is riding up a hill, and giving 
money to a blowsy beggar-wench. matutini 



44 Thackeray / the Humourist 

rores auroeque salubres ! in what a wonderful 
way has the artist managed to create you out of 
a few bladders of paint and pots of varnish. You 
can see the matutinal dews twinkling in the 
grass, and feel the fresh, salubrious airs (' the 
breath of Nature blowing free,' as the Corn-law 
man sings) blowing free over the heath. Silvery 
vapours are rising up from the blue lowlands. 
You can tell the hour of the morning and the 
time of the year ; you can do anything but de- 
scribe it in words. As with regard to the 
Poussin above-mentioned, one can never pass it 
without bearing away a certain pleasing, dream- 
ing feeling of awe and musing ; the other land- 
scape inspires the spectator infallibly with the 
most delightful briskness and cheerfulness of 
spirit. Herein lies the vast privilege of the 
landscape painter ; he does not address you with 
one fixed particular subject or expression, but 
w^ith a thousand never contemplated by himself, 
and which only arise out of occasion. You may 
always be looking at a natural landscape as at a 
fine pictorial imitation of one ; it seems eternally 



cmd the Man of Letters, 



producing new thoughts in your bosom, as it 
does fresh beauties from its own." 

It is certain that he had developed a talent 
for writing long before he had abandoned his 
intention of becoming a j)ainter, and that he 
became a contributor to magazines at a time 
when there was at least no necessity for his 
earning a livelihood by his pen. It is probable, 
therefore, that it was his success in the 
literary art, rather than his failure, as has been 
assumed, in acquiring skill as a painter, which 
gradually drew him into that career of author- 
ship, the pecuniary profits of which became after- 
wards more important to him. Other papers of 
his, written at this undecided period of his life, 
contain numerous interesting evidences of his 
growing love of literature. Of his contemporary 
English writers he has much to say. " Pick- 
wick," and " Nicholas Isickleby," then publish- 
ing, are frequently mentioned. We have seen 
how he quotes the Corn Law Rhymer, then 
but little known to the English public. Speak- 
ing of the French he says, "They made Tom 



4:6 ThxKikei'ay / tlie Humourist 

Paine a deputy ; and as for Tom Macaulay they 
would make a dynasty of him." In a paper 
" On French fashionable Novels," in an American 
newspaper, of which he was the Paris correspon- 
dent, he thus alludes to the circulating libraries 
of Paris, from which he obtained his supply of 
contemporary reading : — 

" Twopence a volume bears us whithersoever we 
will ; — back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or to 
Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with 
Walter Scott ; up to the heights of fashion with 
the charming enchanters of the silver-fork school ; 
or, better still, to the snug inn parlour or the 
jovial taj)-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faith- 
ful Sancho Weller. 

" I am sure that a man who, a hundred 
years hence, should sit down to write the his- 
tory of our time, would do wrong to put that 
great contemporary history of ' Pickwick ' aside, as 
a frivolous work. It contains true character under 
false names ; and, like ' Roderick Random,' an 
inferior work, and ^ Tom Jones ' (one that is im- 
measurably superior), gives us a better idea of 
the state and ways of the people, than one could 



I 



cmd the Man of Letters, 4Si 

gather from any more pompous or authentic his- 
tories." 

In another paper on Caricatures and Lithogra- 
phy, in the same journal, containing a kindly allu- 
sion to his friend, George Cruikshank, he developes 
this idea further, giving us a still more interesting 
view of his reading, and of his growing preference 
for fiction over other forms of literature. '^ At 
the close," he says, " of his history of George II., 
SmoUet condescends to give a short chapter on 
Literature and Manners. He speaks of Glover's 
* Leonidas,' Gibber's * Careless Husband,' the 
poems of Mason, Gray, the two Whiteheads, ' the 
nervous style, extensive erudition, an^ superior 
sense of a Cooke ; the delicate taste, the polished 
muse, and tender feeling of a Lyttelton.' ^ King,' 
he says, ^ shone unrivalled in Roman eloquence, 
the female sex distinguished themselves by their 
taste and ingenuity. Miss Carter rivalled the 
celebrated Dacier in learning and critical know- 
ledge ; Mrs. Lennox signalized herself by many 
successful efforts of genius, both in poetry and 
prose ; and Miss Reid excelled the celebrated 
Rosalba in portrait painting, both in miniature 



48 Tliackeray / the Humourist 

and at large, in oil as well as in crayons. The 
genius of Cervantes was transferred into the novels 
of Fielding, who painted the characters and 
ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength, 
humour and propriety. The field of history and 
biography was cultivated by many writers of 
ability, among whom we distinguish the copious 
Guthrie, the circnmstantial Ralph, the laborious 
Carte, the learned and elegant Robertson, and 
above all, the ingenious, penetrating, and com- 
prehensive Hume,' &c. &c. We will quote no 
more of the passage. Could a man in the best 
humour sit down to write a graver satire % Who 
cares for the tender muse of Lyttelton? Who 
knows the signal efforts of Mrs. Lennox's genius ? 
who has seen the admirable performances, in 
miniature and at large, in oil as well as in crayons, 
of a Miss Reid ? Laborious Carte, and circum- 
stantial Ralph, and copious Guthrie, where are 
they, their works, and their reputation ? Mrs. 
Lennox's name is just as clean wiped out of the 
list of worthies as if she had never been born ; 
and Miss Reid, though she was once actual flesh 
and blood, ' rival in miniature and at large ' of 



and the Man of Letters, 49 

been at all ; her little farthing rushlight of a soul 
and reputation having burnt out, and left nei- 
ther wick nor tallow. Death, too, has overtaken 
copious Guthrie and circumstantial Ralph. Only 
a few know whereabouts is the grave where lies 
laborious Carte ; and yet, oh ! wondi'ous power 
of genius ! Fielding's men and women are alive, 
though history's are not. The progenitors of cir- 
cumstantial Ralph, sent forth, after much labour 
and pains of mating, educating, feeding, clothing, 
a real man-child — a great palpable mass of flesh, 
bones, and blood (we say nothing about the spirit), 
which was to move through the world, ponderous, 
writing histories, and to die, having achieved the 
title of circumstantial Ralph ; and lo ! without 
any of the trouble that the parents of Ralph had 
undergone, alone, perhaps, in a watch or spung- 
ing-house, fuddled, most likely, in the blandest, 
easiest, and most good-humoured way in the 
world, Henry Fielding makes a number of men 
and women on so many sheets of paper, not only 
more amusing than Ralph or Miss Reid, but more 
like flesh and blood, and more alive now than 
they. 



50 Thackeray / the Humourist 

" Is not Amelia preparing her husband's little 
supper? Is not Miss Snap chastely prevent- 
insr the crime of Mr. Firebrand ? Is not 
Parson Adams in the midst of his family, and 
Mr. Wild taking his last bowl of punch with the 
E'ewgate Ordinary ? Is not every one of them 
a real substantial have-hQGn personage now? — 
more real than Reid or Ealpli ? For our parts, 
we will not take upon ourselves to say that they 
do not exist somewhere else ; that the actions at- 
tributed to them have not really taken place ; cer- 
tain we are that they are more worthy of credence 
than Ralph, who may or may not have been cir- 
cumstantial ; — who may or may not even have 
existed, a point unworthy of disjmtation. As for 
Miss Reid, we will take an affidavit that neither 
in miniature nor at large did she excel the cele- 
brated Rosalba ; and with regard to Mrs. Lennox, 
we consider her to be a mere figment, like [N^ar- 
cissa. Miss Tabitha Bramble, or any hero or 
heroine depicted by the historian of " Peregrine 
Pickle.' '^ 

Mr. Thackeray had scarcely attained the age 



aifid the Man of Letters, 51 

of three-and-twenty when the young literary art- 
student in Paris was recognised as an established 
contributor of " Fraser," worthy to take a per- 
manent place among that brilliant staff which 
then rendered this spirited periodical famous both 
in England and on tlie continent. It was then 
under the editorship of the celebrated Maginn, 
one of the last of those compounds of genius and 
profound scholarship, with reckless extravagance 
and loose morals, who once flourished under the 
encouragement of a tolerant public opinion. 
There can be no doubt that the editor and 
Greek scholar, who is always in difficulties, who 
figures in several of his works, is a faithful pic- 
ture of this remarkable man as he appeared to 
his young contributor. His friend, Mr. Hannay, 
says : — 

'• Certain it is, that he lent — or in plainer 
English — gave — five hundred pounds to poor old 
Maginn, when he was beaten in the battle of 
life, and like other beaten soldiers made a pris- 
oner — in the fleet. With the generation going 
out, — that of Lamb and Coleridge, — he had, we 



52 Tliackeray y the Humourist 

believe, no personal acquaintance. Sydney Smith 
lie met at a later time ; and he remembered with 
satisfaction that something which he wrote about 
Hood gave pleasure to that delicate humourist 
and poet in his last days. But his first friends 
were the Fraserians, of whom Father Prout, — 
always his intimate, — and Carlyle,— always one 
of his most appreciating friends, — survive. From 
reminiscences of the wilder lights in the ' Fraser ' 
constellation were drawn the pictures of the queer 
fellows connected with literature in ' Pendennis,' 
— Captain Shandon, the ferocious Bludyer, 
stout old Tom Serjeant, and so forth. Maga- 
zines in those days were more brilliant than they 
are now, when they are haunted by the fear of 
shocking the Fogy element in their circulation ; 
and the effect of their greater freedom is seen in 
the buoyant, riant, and unrestrained comedy of 
Thackeray's own earlier ' Fraser ' articles. ' I 
suppose we all begin by being too savage,' is the 
phrase of a letter he wrote in 1849 ; ^ I know one 
viJio did.^ He was alluding here to the ' Yel- 
lowish Papers ' in particular, where living men 



OAxd the Man of Letters. 53 

were very freely handled. This old, wild satmc 
spirit it was which made him interrupt even the- 
early chapters of ' Yanity Fair,' by introducing 
a parody, which he could not resist, of some con- 
temporary novelists." * 

But we have a proof of the fact of how fully 
he was recognised by his brother Fraserians as of 
themselves in Maclise's picture of the Fraser 
contributors, prefixed to the number of " Fraser 's 
Magazine," for January, 1835 — a picture which 
must have been drawn at some period in the 
previous year. This picture represents a banquet 
at the house of the publisher, Mr. Fraser, at 
which, on some of his brief visits to London, 
Thackeray had doubtless been present, for it is 
easy to trace in the juvenile features of the tall 
figure with the double eyeglass — Mr. Thackeray 
was throughout life somewhat near-sighted — a 
portrait of the future author of " Yanity Fair." 
Mr. Mahony, the well-known " Father Prout " of 
the magazine, in his account of the picture 
written in 1859, tells us that the banquet was 

* Edinburgh JEroening Courant^ Jan. 5, 1864. 



64 Thackeray / the Hunwv/rist 

no fiction. In tlie chair appeared Dr. Maginn 
in the act of making a speech ; and around 
him, among a host of contributors, including 
Bryan Walker Procter, (better known then as 
Barry Cornwall), Eobert Southey, William Har- 
rison Ainsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James 
Hogg, John Galt,^ Fraser the publisher, having 
on right, Mr. Locl^rt, Theodore Hook, Sir David 
Brewster, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Egerton Brydges, 
Rev.'r^ ,Gleig, Edward Irving, and others, num- 
bering twenty-seven in all — of whom, in 1859, 
eight only were living. 

This celebrated cartoon of the Fraserians 
appears to place Mr. Thackeray's connexion with 
the Magazine before 1835 ; but we have not suc- 
ceeded in tracing any contribution from his hand 
earlier than Nov. 1837. Certainly, the after- 
wards well-used noms de plicme of Michael 
Angelo Titmarsli, Fitzboodle, Charles Yellow- 
plush, and Ikey Solomons, are wanting in the 
earlier volumes. 

It is in the number for the month and 
year referred to that we first find him con- 



and the Man of Letters. 55 

tributing a paper which is not reprinted in 
his '* Miscellanies," and which is interesting as 
explaining the origin of that assnmed character 
of a footman in which the author of the " Yel- 
lowplush Papers ■' and " Jeames's Diary " after- 
wards took delight. A little volume had been 
published in 1837, entitled " My Book ; or the 
Anatomy of Conduct by John Henry Skelton." 
The writer of this absurd book had been a 
woollen draper in the neighbourhood of Regent- 
street. He had become possessed of the fixed 
idea that he was destined to become the instruc- 
tor of mankind in the true art of etiquette. He 
gave parties to the best company whom he could 
induce to eat his dinners and assemble at his 
conversaziones, where his amiable delusion was 
the frequent subject of the jokes of his friends. 
Skelton, however, felt them little. He spent 
what fortune he had, and brought himself to a 
position in which his fashionable acquaintances 
no longer troubled him with their attentions ; 
but he did not- cease to be, in his own estima- 
tion, a model of deportment. He husbanded his 



56 Thackeray / the HuTYbourist 

small resources, limiting himself to an humble 
dinner daily, at a coffee-house in the neighbour- 
hood of his old home, where his perfectly fitting 
dress-coat — ^for in this article he was still en- 
abled to shine — his brown wig and dyed whiskers, 
his ample white cravat of the style of the Prince 
Regent's days, and his well polished boots, were 
long destined to raise the character of the house 
on which he bestowed his patronage. In the days 
of his prosperity, Skelton was understood among 
his acquaintances to be engaged on a work which 
should hand down to posterity the true code of 
etiquette — that body of unwritten law which 
regulated the society of the time of his favourite 
monarch. In the enforced " retirement of his 
less prosperous days, the woollen-draper's literary 
design had time to develop itself, and in the year 
1837, '' My Book ; or the Anatomy of Conduct 
by John Henry Skelton," was finally given to 
the world. 

It was this little volume which fell in the 
way of Thackeray, who undertook to review 
it for " Fraser's Magazine." In order to do 



and the Man of Letters. 5Y 

full justice to the work, nothing seemed more 
proper than to present the reviewer in the as- 
sumed character of a fashionable footman. The 
review, therefore, took the form of a letter from 
Charles Yellowplush, Esq., containing " Fashion- 
able fax and polite Annjgoats," dated from 

" No. , Grosvenor Square, (K.B. — Hairy 

Bell)," and addressed to Oliver Yorke, the well- 
known pseudonym of the Editor of " Eraser." 
To this accident may be attributed those extra- 
ordinary efforts of cicography which had their 
geiTQ in the Oxford " Snob," but which attained 
their full development in the Miscellanies, the 
Ballads, the Snob papers, and other short 
works, and also in some portions even of the 
latest of the author's novels. The precepts and 
opinions of " Skelton," or " Skeleton," as the 
reviewer insisted on calling the author of the 
" Anatomy," were fully developed and illustrated 
by Mr. Yellowplush. The footman who reviewed 
the " fashionable world," achieved a decided suc- 
cess. Charles Yellowplush was requested by 
the editor to extend his comments upon society 
and books, and in January, 1838, the "Yel- 
3* 



58 Thadcerwy / the Huinourist 

lowplusli Papers " were commenced, with those 
peculiar rude illustrations by the author, which 
appear at first to have been suggested by the 
style of Maclise's portraits in the same maga- 
zine, but which afterwards became habitual to 
him. 



and the Man of Letters, 59 



CHAPTER III. 

« 

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PICKWICK PAPERS — ROYAL ACAD- 
EMY EXHIBITION — DICKENS — ^EXECUTIONS IN PARIS — 
RETURN TO LONDON — PARIS LETTERS — MARRIAGE — 
YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS — OTHER WRITINGS — CONTRIBU- 
TIONS TO THE WESTMINSTER — PARIS SKETCH BOOK — 
SECOND EDITION — HISTORY OF SAMUEL TITMARSH — FITZ- 
BOODLE's CONFESSIONS — CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES 
— NOTES OF A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO CAIRO — 
WRITINGS FOR PUNCH — OTHER WORKS. 

It was in tb# year 1836 that Mr. Thackeray, 
according to an anecdote related by himself, 
offered Mr. Dickens to nndertake the task of 
illustrating one of his works. The story was told 
by the former at an anniversary dinner of the 
Koyal Academy a few years since, Mr. Dickens 
being present on the occasion. " I can remember 
(said Mr. Thackeray) when Mr. Dickens was a 



/ 
60 Thackeray / the Humourist 

very young man, and had commenced delighting 
the world with some charming humorous works in 
covers, which were coloured light green, and came 
out once a month, that this young man wanted an 
artist to illustrate his writings ; and I recollect 
walking up to his chambers in Furnival's Inn, 
with two or three drawings in my hand, which, 
strange to say, he did not find suitable. But for 
the unfortunate blight which came over my artis- 
tical existence, it would have been my pride and 
my pleasure to have endeavoured one day to find 
a place on these walls for one of my performances." 
The work referred to was the " Pickwick Papers," 
which were originally commenced in April of that 
year, as the result of an agreement with Mr. 
Dickens and Mi*. Seymour, the comic artist — the 
one to write, and the other to illustrate, a book 
which should exhibit the adventures of cockney 
sportsmen. As our readers know, the descriptive 
letterpress, by the author of the " Sketches by 
Boz," soon attracted the attention of the world ; 
while the clever illustrations by Seymour, which 
had the merit of creating the well-known pictorial 
characteristics of Mr. Pickwick and his friends, 



and the Man of Letters. 61 

became regarded only as illustrations of the new 
humourist's immortal work. Unhappily, only 
two or three monthly numbers had been com- 
pleted, when Seymour destroyed himself in a fit 
of derangement. A new artist was wanted, and 
the result was the singular interview between the 
two men whose names, though representing schools 
of fiction so widely different, were destined to 
become constantly associated in the public mind. 
Mr. Dickens was then entering into that great 
fame as a writer of fiction which has never flagged 
from that time. The young artist had scarcely 
attempted literature, and had still before him 
many years of obscurity. The slow growth of his 
fame presents a curious contrast to the career of 
his fellow-novelist. So much as Mr. Thackeray 
subsequently worked in contributing to " Eraser," 
in co-operating with others on daily newspapers, 
in writing for " Cruikshank's Comic Almanac," 
for the " Times " and the " Examiner," for 
" Punch," and for the " Westminster " and other 
Reviews, it could not be said that he was really 
known to the public till the publication of 
" Yanity Fair," when he had been an active 



62 Thackeray / the Humourist 

literary man for at. least ten years^ and had at- 
tained the age of thirty-seven. The '' Yellowphish 
Papers," in " Fraser," enjoyed a sort of popularity, 
and were at least widely quoted in the newspapers ; 
but of their author few inquired. I^either did the 
two volumes of the " Paris Sketch Book," though 
presenting many good specimens of his peculiar 
humour, nor the account of the second funeral of 
Napoleon, nor even the " Irish Sketch Book," do 
much to make their writer known. It was his 
" Yanity Fair," which issued in shilling monthly 
parts, took the world of readers, as it were, by 
storm ; and an appreciative article, from the hand 
of a friend, in the " Edinburgh Review " in 1848, 
which, for the first time, helped to spread the 
tidings of a new master of fiction among us, des- 
tined to make a name second to none in English 
literature in its own field. 

A leading article in a morning newspaper on 
the occasion of Mr. Thackeray's death, in telling 
the anecdote of his offer to illustrate " Pickwick," 
adds, that disappointed at the rejection of his offer, 
he exclaimed, " "Well, if you will not let me draw, 
1 will write ; " and from that hour determined to 



and the Man of Letters. 63 

compete with his inustrions brother novelist for 
public favour. Nothing could be more opposed 
to the facts than this coloured version of the 
anecdote. It was not for a year or two after the 
event referred to that he began seriously to de- 
vote himself to literary labour ; and his articles, 
published anonymously, and only now for the first 
time brought into notice, became recognised from 
their noms deplume^ to have been written by him, 
contain the best evidences that he felt no shadow 
of ill-will for a rejection which he always good- 
humom-edly alluded to as " Mr. Pickwick's lucky 
escape." He was an early and sincere admirer 
of Mr. Dickens's writings. In the midst of the 
often savagely sarcastic reviews of literature which 
he contributed to home and American magazines, 
there are frequent references — generally enthu- 
siastic ; and even when taking exception to some 
feature of the work, always respectful to the great 
powers of the man whom the readers of a subse- 
quent period delighted to contrast with himself 
as the only living writer of fiction worthy to be 
named with the author of " Yanity Fair." In 
the magazine for February 1840, at the end of a 



64 Thackeray / the Humourist 

clever satire upon the *' Newgate Calendar " 
school of romance, purporting to be written by 
Ikey Solomons, jun. 5 he thus remarks upon " Oliver 
Twist : " — " No man has read that remarkable 
tale without being interested in poor Nancy and 
her murderer, and especially amused and tickled by 
the gambols of the skilful Dodger and his com- 
panions. The power of the writer is so amazing that 
the reader at once becomes his captive, and must 
follow him whithersoever he leads ; and to what 
are we led % Breathless to watch all the crimes 
of Fagin, tenderly to deplore the errors of Nancy, 
to have for Bill Sikes a kind of pity and admira- 
tion, and an absolute love for the society of the 
Dodger. All these heroes stepped from the novel 
on to the stage ; and the whole London public, 
from peers to chimney-sweeps, were interested 
about a set of ruffians whose occupations are 
thievery, murder, and prostitution. A most 
agreeable set of rascals, indeed, who have their 
virtues, too, bitt not good company for any man. 
We had better pass them by in decent silence ; 
for, as no writer can or dare tell the whole truth 
concerning them, and faithfully explain their 



cmd the Man of Letters. 65 

vices, there is no need to give ex-jparte statements 
of their virtues. * « * * 4f 

The pathos of the workhouse scenes in ' Oliver 
Twist,' of the Fleet Prison descriptions in ' Pick- 
wick,' is genuine and pure — as much of this as 
you please ; as tender a hand to the poor, as 
kindly a word to the unhappy, as you will ; but, 
in the name of common sense, let us not expend 
our sympathies on cutthroats, and other such 
prodigies of evil ! " 

Still later, when commenting on the Royal 
Academy Exhibition, we find another interest- 
ing reference to Mr. Dickens, with a prophecy 
of his future greatness : — " Look, (he says 
in the assumed character of Michael Angelo 
Titmarsh), at the portrait of Mr. Dickens, — well 
arranged as a picture, good in colour, and light 
and shadow, and as a likeness perfectly amazing ; 
a looking-glass could not render a better facsimile. 
Here we have the real identical man Dickens : 
the artist must have understood the inward Boz 
as well as the outward before he made this ad- 
mirable representation of him. "What cheerful 
intelligence there is about the man's eyes and 



6Q Thackeray / the Ilumoitrist 

large foreliead ! Tlie mouth is too large and 
full, too eager and active, perhaps ; the smile is 
very sweet and generous. If Monsieur de Balzac, 
that voluminous physiognomist, could examine 
this head, he would, no doubt, intei'pret every tone 
and wrinkle in it : the nose firm, and well placed ; 
the nostrils wide and full, as are the nostrils of 
all men of genius (this is Monsieur Balzac's 
maxim). The past and the future, says Jean 
Paul, are written in every countenance. I think 
we may promise ourselves a brilliant future from 
this one. There seems no flagging as yet in it, 
no sense of fatigue, or consciousness of decaying 
power. Long may est thou, O Boz ! reign over 
thy comic kingdom ; long may we pay tribute, 
whether of threepence w^eekly or of a shilling 
monthly, it matters not. Mighty prince ! at thy 
imperial feet, Titmarsh, humblest of thy servants, 
offers his vows of loyalty and his humble tribute 
of praise." 

But a still more touchmg and beautiful tribute 
to IVIi*. Dickens's genius from the yet unknown 
Michael Angelo Titmarsh appears in " Fraser " for 
July 184:4. A box of Christmas books is sup- 



and the Man of Letters. 67 

posed to have been sent by the editor to Titmarsh 
in his retirement in Switzerland, whence the latter 
writes his notions of their contents. The last book 
of all is Mr. Dickens's Christmas Carol — we 
mean the story of old Scrooge — the immortal pre- 
cursor of that long line of Christmas stories which 
are now so familiar to his readers. 

'-' And now (says the critic) there is but one 
book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh ! 
how much the best of all. It is the work of the 
master of all the English humourists now alive ; 
the young man who came and took his place 
calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who 
has kept it. Think of all we owe Mr. Dickens 
since those half dozen years, that store of happy 
hours that he has made us pass, the kindly 
and pleasant companions whom he has introduced 
to us ; the harmless laughter, the generous wit, 
the frank, manly, human love which he has taught 
us to feel ! Every month of those years has 
brought us some kind token from this delightful 
genius. His books may have lost in art, perhaps, 
but could we afford to wait? Since the days 
Avhen the ^ Spectator ' was produced by a man of 



68 Thackeray / the Humourist 

kindred mind and temper, what books have ap- 
peared that have taken so affectionate a hold of 

the English public as these ? 

* * -Sf * * 

Who can listen to objections regarding snch a 
book as this ? It seems to me a national benefit, 
and to every man or woman who reads it a per- 
sonal kindness. The last two people I heard 
speak of it were women ; neither knew the other, 
or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, 
' God bless him t ' * * * * '^ 

As for Tiny Tim, there is a certain passage in the 
book regarding that young gentleman, about 
which a man should hardly venture to speak in 
print or in public, any more than he would of any 
other affections of his private heart. There is 
not a reader in England but that little creature 
will be a bond of union between author and him ; 
and he will say of Charles Dickens, as the woman 
just now, ' God bless him ! ' What a feeling is 
this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a 
reward to reap." 

Mr. Thackeray was in Paris in March, 1836, 
at the time of the execution of Fieschi and 



OAid the Man of Letters, 69 

Lacenaire, upon which subject he wrote some 
remarks in one of his anonymous papers, which it 
is interesting to compare with the more advanced 
views in favour of the abolition of the punishment 
of death, which are familiar to the readers of his 
subsequent article, " On going to see a Man 
Hanged." He did not witness the execution 
either of Fieschi or Lacenaire, though he made 
unsuccessful attempts to be present at both 
cases. 

" The day for Fieschi's death was, purposely, 
kept secret ; and he was executed at a remote 
quarter of the town." But the scene on the 
morning when his execution did not take place 
was never forgotten by the young English 
artist. 

It was carnival time, and the rumour had pretty 
generally been carried abroad, that the culprit 
was to die on that morning. A friend, who ac- 
companied Thackeray, came many miles, through 
the mud and dark, in order to be " in at the death." 
They set out before light, floundering through the 
muddy Champs Elysees, where were many others 
bent upon the same errand. They passed by the 



YO Thackerajy / the Humourist 

Concert of Musard, then held in the Eue St. 
Honore ; and round this, in the wet, a number of 
coaches were collected ; the ball was just up ; and 
a crowd of people, in hideous masquerade, drunk, 
tired, dirty, dressed in horrible old frippery, 
and daubed with filthy rouge, were trooping out 
of the place ; tipsy women and men, shrieking, 
jabbering, gesticulating, as French will do ; parties 
swaggering, staggering forwards, arm in arm, 
reeling to and fro across the street, and yelling 
songs in chorus. Hundreds of these were bound 
for the show, and the two friends thought them- 
selves lucky in finding a vehicle to the execution 
place, at the Barrier e d'Enfer. As they crossed 
the river, and entered the Kue d'Enfer, crowds of 
students, black w^orkmen, and more drunken devils, 
from more carnival balls, were filling it ; and on 
the grand place there were thousands of these 
assembled, looking out for Fieschi and his cortege. 
They waited, but no throat-cutting that morning ; 
no august spectacle of satisfied justice ; and the 
eager spectators were obliged to return, disap- 
pointed of their exj)ected breakfast of blood. " It 
would " (says Thackeray) " have been a fine scene, 



and the Man of Letters. 71 

that execution, could it but have taken place in 
the midst of the mad mountebanks and tipsy 
strumpets, who had flocked so far to witness it, 
wishing to wind up the delights of their carnival 
by a honne-houche of a murder." 

The other attempt was equally unfortunate. 
The same friend accompanied him ; but they ar- 
rived too late on the ground to be present at the 
execution of Lacenaire and his co-mate in murder, 
Avril. But as they came to the spot (a gloomy 
round space, within the barrier — three roads led 
to it — and, outside, they saw the wine-shops and 
restaurateurs of the barrier looking gay and 
inviting), they only found, in the midst of it, a 
little pool of ice, just partially tinged with red. 
Two or three idle street boys were dancing and 
stamping about this pool ; and when the English- 
men asked one of them whether the execution had 
taken place, he began dancing more madly than 
ever, and shrieked out with a loud fantastic 
theatrical voice, " Yenez tons Messieurs et Dames, 
voyez ici le sang die monstre, Lacenaire, et de son 
comrpagnon, le traitre Avril / " and, straightway, 
all the other gamins screamed out the words in 



72 Thackeray / the Humoui'ist 

clionis, and took hands and danced round the 
little puddle. " Oh, august Justice ! " exclaimed 
the young art-student, " your meal was followed 
by a pretty appropriate grace ! Was any man 
who saw the show deterred, or frightened, or 
moralized in any way ? He had gratified his 
appetite for blood, and this was all. Remark 
what a good breakfast you eat after an execution ; 
how pleasant it is to cut jokes after it, and upon 
it. This merry, pleasant mood, is brought on by 
the blood-tonic." 

Mr. Thackeray returned to London in March, 
1836, and resided for a few months in the house 
of his stepfather. Major Henry Carmichael Smyth. 
The principal object of his return was to concert 
with Major Smyth, who was a gentleman of some 
literary attainments, a project for starting a daily 
newspaper. The time was believed to be re- 
markably opportune for the new journal ; the old 
oppressive newspaper stamp being about to be 
repealed, and a penny stamp, giving the privilege 
of a free transition through the post, about 
to be substituted. The project was to form a 
small joint-stock company, to be called the 



and the Man of Letters. 73 

Metropolitan Newspaper Company, with a capital 
of 60,000Z., in shares of 10^. each. The Major,, 
as chief proprietor, became chairman of the new 
company ; Laman Blanchard was appointed 
editor, Douglas Jerrold a dramatic critic, and 
Thackeray the Paris correspondent. An old and 
respectable, though decayed journal, entitled the 
Public Ledger^ was purchased by the company ; 
and on the 15th of September, the first day of 
the new stamp duty, the newspaper was started, 
with the title of the Constitutional and Piiblic 
Ledger. The politics of the paper were ultra- 
liberal. Its programme was entire freedom of 
the press, extension of popular sufi*rage, vote by 
ballot, shortening of dm'ation of parliaments, 
equality of civil rights and religious liberty, &c. 
A number of the most eminent of the advanced 
party, including Mr. Grote, Sir "William Moles- 
worth, Mr. Joseph Hume, and Colonel Thompson, 
publicly advertised their intention to support the 
new journal, and to promote its circulation. Mr. 
Thackeray's Paris letters, signed '' S. T.," com- 
menced on the 24:th of September, and were con- 
tinued at intervals until the Spring of the follow- 
4 



74: Thackeray / the Humourist 

ing year : tliey present little worth notice. At 
that time the chatty correspondent, who discourses 
upon all things save the subject of his letter, was a 
thing unknown. Bare facts, such as the telegraph- 
wires now bring us, with here and there a soujpgon 
of ^philosophical reflection, was the utmost that the 
readers of newspapers in those days demanded 
of the useful individual who kept watch in the 
, capital of civilization for events of interest. Gene- 
rally, however, the letters are characterized by a 
strong distaste for the Government of July, and 
by an ardent liberalism which had but slightly 
cooled down when, at the Oxford election in 
1857, he declared himself an uncompromising 
advocate of vote by ballot. Writing from Paris 
on October 8, he says : — " We are luckily too 
strong to dread much from open hostility, or to 
be bullied back into toryism by our neighbours ; 
but if radicalism be a sin in their eyes, it exists, 
thank God ! not merely across the Alps, but 
across the channel." The new journal, however, 
was far from prosperous. After enlarging its size 
and raising its price from foui-pence-halfpenny to 
fivepence, it gradually declined in circulation. 



and the Man of Letters. 75 

Tlie last number appeared on the 1st of July, 
1837, bearing black borders for the death of the 
king. '' "We can estimate, therefore (says the dy- 
ing speech of the Constitutional)^ the feelings of the 
gentleman who once walked at his own funeral," 
and the editor, or perhaps his late Paris Corre- 
spondent adds, '' The adverse circumstances have 
been various. In the philosophy of ill-luck it may 
be laid down as a principle that every point 
of discouragement tends to one common centre 
of defeat. When the fates do concur in one dis- 
comfiture their unanimity is wonderful. So has 
it happened in the case of the Constitutional. In 
the first place, a delay of some months conse- 
quent upon the postponement of the newspaper 
stamp reduction, operated on the minds of many 
who were originally parties to the enterprise ; in 
the next, the majority of those who remained 
faithful were wholly inexperienced in the art and 
mystery of the practical working of an important 
daily journal ; in the third, and consequent upon 
the other two, there was the want of those abun- 
dant means, and of that wise application of re- 
sources, without which no efficient organ of the 



T6 Thackeray / the Humourist 

interests of any class of men — to say nothing of 
the interests of that first and greatest class whose 
welfare has been onr dearest aim, and most con- 
stant object — can be successfully established. 
Then came further misgivings on the part of 
friends, and the delusive undertakings of friends 
in disguise." The venture proved in every way 
a disastrous one. Although nominally supported 
by a joint-stock company, the burden of the un- 
dertaking really rested upon the original promo- 
ters, of whom Major Smyth was the principal, 
while his stepson, Mr. Thackeray, also lost nearly 
all that remained of his fortune. 

It was shortly after the failure of the Consti- 
tutional that Mr. Thackeray married in Paris a 
Miss Shaw, sister of the Caj)tain Shaw, an Indian 
officer, who was one of the mourners at his fune- 
ral, an Irish lady of good family, who bore him 
two daughters, the elder of whom has recently 
shown something of her illustrious father's talent, 
in the remarkable story of " Elizabeth," written 
by her, and published in the " Cornhill Maga- 
zine." In 1837 he left that city with his family, 
and resided for two years in London, when for the 



and the Mem of Letters, Y7 

first time he began to devote himself seriously to 
literary labour, adding, according to a French 
writer, occasional work as an illustrator. We are 
told that he contributed some papers to the Times 
during Barnes's editorship — an article on " Field- 
ing " among them. He is believed to have been 
connected with two literary papers of his time — 
the Torch^ edited by Felix Fax, Esq., and the 
Parthenon^ which must not be confounded with 
a literary journal with the same name recently 
existing. The Torch^ which was started on the 
26th of August, 1837, ran only for six months ; 
and was immediately succeeded by the Parthenon^ 
which had a longer existence. In neither paper, 
however, is it possible to trace any sign of that 
shrewd criticism or overflowing humour which 
distinguish the papers in " Fraser." For the latter 
publication he laboured assiduously, and it was 
at this time that the " Yellowplush Papers " ap- 
peared, with occasional notices of the Exhibitions 
of Paintings in London. Among his writings of 
this period (1837-1840), we also find '' Stubb's 
Calendar, or the Fatal Boots," contributed to his 
friend Cruikshank's " Comic Almanac " for 1839, 



78 Thackeray / tlie Humourist 



and since included in the " Miscellanies ; " '' Cathe- 
rine, by Ikey Solomons, jnn.," a long continuous 
story, founded on the crime of Catherine Hays, 
the celebrated murderess of the last century, and 
intended to ridicule the novels of the school of 
Jack Sheppard ; " Cartouche " and " Painsonnet," 
two stories, and " Epistles to the Liberator." In 
1839 he visited Paris again at the request of the 
proprietor of " Fraser," in order to write an ac- 
count of the French Exhibition of Paintings, 
which appears in the December number. 

On his return he devoted himself to the writing 
of " The Shabby Genteel " story, which was begun 
in '^ Fraser " for June, and continued in the 
numbers for July, August, and October, when it 
stopped unfinished at the ninth chapter. The 
story of this strange failure is a mournful one. 
While busily engaged in writing this beautiful 
and affecting story, a dark shadow descended upon 
his household, making all the associations of that 
time painful to him forever. The terrible truth, 
long suspected, that the chosen partner of his good 
and evil fortunes could never participate in the 
'success for which he had toiled, became confirmed. 



and the Man of Letters. 1P& 

The mental disease which had attacked his wife 
rapidly developed itself, until the hopes which had 
sustained those to whom she was most dear were 
wholly extinguished. Mr. Thackeray was not one 
of tKose who love to parade their domestic sorrows 
before the world. ISTo explanation of his strange 
failure to complete his story was given to his 
readers ; but, years afterwards, in reprinting it in 
his miscellanies, he alluded to the circumstances 
which had paralyzed his hand, and rendered him 
incapable of ever resuming the thread of his story, 
with a touching suggestiveness for those who knew 
the facts. The tale was interrupted, he said, " at 
a sad period of the writer's own life." When the 
republication of the miscellanies was announced, 
it was his intention to complete the little story — 
but the colours were long since dry — the artist's 
hand had changed. It " was best," he says, " to 
leave the sketch as it was when first resigned 
seventeen years ago. The memory of the past is 
renewed as he looks at it."* 

It was in 1840 that Mr. Thackeray contributed 
to the '^ Westminster" a beautiful and appreciative 

* Miscellanies," vol. iv. p. 324. \ 



80 Thackeray / the Humourist 

article upon the productions of liis friend, George 
Cruiksliank, illustrated — an unusual thing for the 
great organ of the philosophers of the schools of 
Bentham, J. Mill, and Sir W. Molesworth — with 
numerous specimens of the comic sketches of the 
subject of the papers. His defence of Cruikshank 
from the cavils of those who loved to dwell upon 
his defects as a draughtsman is full of sound criti- 
cism ; his claim for his friend as something far 
greater, a man endowed with that rarest of all 
faculties, the power to create, are inspired by a 
generous enthusiasm which give a life and spirit 
to the paper not often found in a critical review. 
But perhaps the finest passage in the article is 
the concluding words : — " Many artists, we hear, 
hold his works rather cheap; they prate about 
bad drawing, want of scientific knowledge— they 
would have something vastly more neat, regular, 
anatomical. Kot one of the whole band, most 
likely, but can paint an academy figure better than 
himself— nay, or a portrait of an alderman's lady 
and family of children. But look down the list of 
the painters, and tell us who are they ? How many 
among these men are poets, makers, possessing 



and the Mem of Letters, St 

the faculty to create, the greatest among the gifts 
with which Providence has endowed the mind of 
man ? Saj how many there are ? Count up what 
they have done, and see what, in the course of 
some nine and twenty years, has been done by 
this indefatigable man. What amazing energetic 
fecundity do we find in him ! As a boy, he began 
to fight for bread, has been hungry (twice a day, 
we trust) ever since, and has been obliged to sell 
his wit for his bread week by week. And his wit, 
sterling gold as it is, will find no such purchasers 
as the fashionable painter's thin pinchbeck, who 
can live comfortably for six weeks, when paid for 
and painting a portrait, and fancies his mind pro- 
digiously occupied all the while. There was an 
artist in Paris — an artist hairdresser — who used to 
be fatigued and take restoratives after inventing 
a new coiffure. By no such gentle operation of 
head-dressing has Cruikshank lived \ time was (we 
are told so in print) when for a picture with thirty 
heads in it, he was paid three guineas — a poor 
week's pittance truly, and a dire week's labour. 
We make no doubt that the same labour would at 
present bring him twenty times the sum ; but 
4* 



82 Thackeray / the Hiimourist 

whether it be ill-paid or well, what labour has Mr. 
Cruikshank's been ! Week by week, for thirty 
years, to produce something new 4 some smiling 
offspring of painful labour, quite independent and 
distinct from its ten thousand jovial brethren ; in 
what hours of sorrow and ill-health to be told by 
the world, ' Make us laugh, or you starve — give 
us fresh fun ; we have eaten up the old, and are 
hungry.' And all this has he been obliged to do 
— to wring laughter day by day, sometimes, 
perhaps, out of want, often, certainly, from ill- 
health and depression — to keep the fire of his 
brain perpetually alight, for the greedy public will 
give it no leisure to cool. This he has done, and 
done well. He has told a thousand new truths 
in as many strange and fascinating ways ; he has 
given a thousand new and pleasant thoughts to 
millions of people ; he has never used his wit dis- 
honestly ; he has never, in all the exuberance of 
his frolicsome nature, caused a single painful or 
guilty blush. How little do we think of the 
extraordinary power of this man, and how ungrate- 
ful are we to him ! " This long paper, signed 
with the Greek letter Theta, is little known ; but 



and the Man of Letters. S3 

Mr. Thackeray frequently referred to it as a 
labour in which he had felt a peculiar pleasure. 

In a private letter to a literary friend, written 
in 1850, he says : — Don't forget the copy of 
C's Almanack. There is one print of a wedding 
party, which, if it amuses you as it has amused 
me, will be worth the price and carriage. When 
you get it, note the gruff old gentleman on the 
right, who has screwed up his face with a firm 
resolve that he will not shed tears with the rest 
of the company. I fancy that he is a monied 
man, and that there have been family ' expecta- 
tions ' from him. Something seems wanting 
about his liead. Can it be a pen behind the ear ? 
And now I think of it, those features have a bill- 
discounting expression, and he has been accus- 
tomed to say ^ no ; couldn't entertain it ! ' "' * 

In the summer of 184:0 he collected some of 
his sketches inserted in " Eraser," and other pe- 
riodicals, English and foreign, and republished 
them under the title of " The Paris Sketch Book." 
This work is interesting as the first indepen- 

* The author has been fortunate in obtaining permis- 
sion to insert a copy of the picture referred to. 



84 Thackeray j the Humourist 



dent publication of the author, but of its contents 
few things are now remembered. The dedi- 
catory letter prefixed, however, is peculiarly 
characteristic of the writer. It relates to a cir- 
cumstance which had occurred to him some time 
previously in Paris. Tlie old days when money 
was abundant, and loitering among the pictures 
of the Paris galleries could be indulged in with- 
out remorse had gone. The res angusta domi 
with which genius has so often been disturbed in 
its day-dreams began to be familiar to him. The 
unfortunate failure of the Constitutional^ — a loss 
which he, years afterwards, occasionally referred 
to as a foolish commercial speculation on which he 
had ventured in his youth, had absorbed the whole 
of his patrimony. At such a time a temporary 
difficulty in meeting a creditor's demand was not 
uncommon. On one such occasion, a M. Aretz, a 
tailor in the Rue Eichelieu, who had for some time 
supplied him with coats and trousers, presented him 
with a small account for those articles, and was 
met with a statement from his debtor that an im- 
mediate settlement of the bill would be extremely 
inconvenient to him. To his astonishment the 
reply of the creditor was, " Mon Dieu, Sir, let 



and the Man of Letters, 85 

not that annoy you. If you want money, as a 
gentleman often does in a strange country, I 
have a thousand franc note at my house which is 
quite at your service." The generous offer w^as 
accepted. The coin which, in proof of the 
tailor's esteem for his customer, w^as advanced 
without any interest, was duly repaid together 
with the account ; but the circumstance could 
not be forgotten. His debtor felt how becoming 
it was to acknowledge, and praise virtue, as he- 
slyly said, wherever he might find it, and to point 
it out for the admiration and example of his 
fellow-men. Accordingly, he determined to dedi- 
cate his first book to the generous tailor, giving 
at full length his name and address. In the dedi- 
catory letter, he accordingly alludes to this anec- 
dote, adding — 

" History or experience, sir, makes us ac- 
quainted with so few actions that can be com- 
pared to yours ; a kindness like yours, from a 
stranger and a tailor, seems to me so astonishing, 
that you must pardon me for thus making your 
virtue public, and acquainting the English nation 
with your merit and your name. Let me add, 
sir, that you live on the first floor ; that your 



86 Thackeray / the Humourist 

clothes and fit are excellent, and your charges 
moderate and just ; and, as an humble tribute of 
my admiration, permit me to lay these volumes 
at your feet. 

" Your obliged, faithful Servant, 

" M. A. TiTMAKSH." 

A second edition of the " Paris Sketch Book " 
was announced by the publisher, Macrone — the 
same publisher who had a few years before given 
to the world the " Sketches by Boz," the fii-st 
of Mr. Dickens' publications ; but the second 
edition was probably only one of those conven- 
tional fictions with which the spirits of young 
authors are sustained. Though containing many 
flashes of the Titmarsh humour, many eloquent 
passages, and much interesting reading of a light 
kind, the public took but a passing interest in it. 
Years after, in quoting its title, the author good- 
humouredly remarked, in a parenthesis, that some 
copies, he believed, might still be found unsold at 
the publisher's ; but the book was forgotten and 
most of its contents were rejected by the writer 
when preparing his selected miscellanies for the 
press. A similar couple of volumes published by 



and the Man of Letters. 87 

Cunningliam in 1841, under the title of '' Comic 
Tales and Sketches, edited and illustrated by 
Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh,'' and an inde- 
pendent republication, also in two Yolnmes, of 
the '' Yellowplush Papers," from " Fraser," were 
somewhat more successful. The former contained 
" Major Gahagan," and " The Bedford-row Con- 
spiracy," reprinted from '' The New Monthly," 
" Stubbs's Calendar, or the Fatal Boots," from 
Cruikshank's '^ Comic Almanack ; " some amusing 
criticisms on the " Sea Captain," and ^' Lady Char- 
lotte Bury's Diary," and other papers from 
" Fraser." The illustrations to the volumes were 
tinted etchings of a somewhat more careful char- 
acter than those unfinished artistic drolleries in 
which he generally indulged. 

In Dec. 1840, he again visited Paris, and 
remained there until the summer of the following 
year. He was in that city on the memorable 
occasion of the second funeral of Napoleon, or the 
ceremony of conveying the remains of that great 
warrior, of whom, as a child, he had obtained a 
living glimpse, to their last resting place at the 
Hotel des Invalides. An accoimt of that cere- 



88 Thackeray / the Humourist 

moiiy in the form of a letter to Miss Smith, was 
published by Macrone. It was a small square 
pamphlet, chiefly memorable now as containing 
at the end his remarkable poem of " The Chron- 
icle of the Drum." About this time he adver- 
tised as preparing for immediate publication, a 
book entitled " Dinner Beminiscences, or the 
Young Gormandiser's Guide at Paris, by Mr. M. A. 
Titmarsh." It was to be issued by Hugh Cunning- 
ham, the publisher of St. Martin's place, Trafal- 
gar-square ; but we believe, was never published. 
It was in the September number of '' Fraser," 
for 1841, that he commenced his story of the 
'' History of Samuel Titmarsh, and the Great 
Hoggarty Diamond," which though it failed to 
achieve an extraordinary popularity, first con- 
vinced that select few who judge for themselves 
in matters of literature and art, of the great 
power and promise of the unknown " Titmarsh." 
Mr. Carlyle, in his " Life of John Sterling," 
quotes the following remarkable passage from a 
letter of the latter to his mother, written at this 
period : — " I have seen no new books, but am 
reading your last. I got hold of the two first 



and the Man of Letters. 89 

numbers of tlie ' Hoggarty Diamondj' and read 
them with extreme delight. What is there better 
in Fielding or Goldsmith? The man is a time 
genius, and with quiet and comfort might produce 
masterpieces that would last as long as any we 
have, and delight millions of unborn readers. 
There is more truth and nature in one of these 

papers than in all 's novels put together." 

" Thackeray (adds Mr. Carlyle), always a close 
friend of the Sterling house, will observe that 
this is dated 1841, not 1851, and will have his 
own reflections on the matter." The " Hos:- 
garty Diamond " was continued in the numbers 
for October and November, and completed in 
December, 1841. In the number for June of the 
following year, " Fitzboodle's Confessions " were 
commenced, and were continued at intervals down' 
to the end of 1843. The '' Irish Sketch Book," in 
two volumes, detailing an Irish tour, was also pub- 
lished in the latter year. The '' Sketch Book," did 
not at the time attract much attention. The '' Luck 
of Barry Lyndon," by many considered the most 
original of his writings, was begun and finished 
at JS^o. 88, St. James-street, previously known 



90 Thackeray / the Humourist 

as the Conservative Club, where at this time he 
occupied chambers. The first part appeared in 
" Fraser," for January, 1844, and was continued 
regularly every month, till its completion in the 
December number. He was engaged a short time 
before this as assistant editor of the Examiner 
newspaper, to which journal he contributed nume- 
rous articles ; and among his papers in " Fraser," 
and other magazines of the same period, we find, 
" Memorials of Gormandising ; " " Pictorial Rhap- 
sodies on the Exhibitions of Paintings ; " " Blue- 
beard's Ghost ; " a satirical article on Grant's 
*' Paris and the Parisians ; " a " Keview of a Box 
of ISTovels," (already quoted from) ; '' Little Travels 
and Roadside Sketches," (chiefly in Belgium) ; 
" TheP^/'^^^i^m^,by Lancelot Wagstaflf;" a comic 
story with a sequel entitled " Arabella, or the 
Moral of the Partie Fine / " " Carmen Lilliense ; " 
^' Picture Gossip ; " more comic sketches, with the 
titles of ^' The chest of Cigars, by Lancelot Wag- 
staff; " " Bob Robinson's First Love ; " and " Barme- 
side Banquets," and an admirable satirical review 
entitled " A Gossip about Christmas Books." 
The '' Carmen Lilliense " will be well remem- 



and the Man of Letters. 91 

bered by the readers of the " Miscellanies," pub- 
lished in 1857, in which it was included. Mr. 
Thackeray was in the north of France and in 
Belgium about the period when it is dated (2nd 
September, 1843) ; and the ballad describes a real 
accident which befell him, though doubtless some- 
what heiglitened in effect. It tells how leaving 
Paris, with only twenty pounds in his pocket, for 
a trip in Belgium, he arrived at Antwerp, where 
feeling for his purse, he found it had vanished 
with the entire amount of his little treasure. 
Some rascal on the road had picked his pocket ; 
and nothing was left but to borrow ten guineas of 
a friend whom he met, and to write a note to 
England addressed to " Grandmamma," for whom 
we may probably read some other member of the 
Titmarsh family. The ten guineas, however, were 
soon gone, and the sensitive Titmarsh found him- 
self in a position of great delicacy. "What was to 
be done ? " To stealing," says the ballad, ^' he 
could never come." To pawn his watch he felt 
himself ^' too genteel ; " besides, he had left his 
watch at home, which at once put an end to any 
debates on this point. There was nothing to do 



92 Thackeray / the Humourist 

but to wait for the remittance, and beguile the 
time with a poetical description of his woes. The 
guests around him ask for their bills. Titmarsh 
is in agonies. The landlord regards him as a 
'' Lord- Anglais," serves him with the best of 
meat and drink, and is proud of his patronage. 
A sense of being a kind of impostor weighs upon 
him. The landlord's eye becomes painful to look 
at. Opposite is a dismal building — the prison- 
house of Lille, where, by a summary process, 
familiar to French law, foreigners who run in 
debt without the means of paying may be lodged. 
He is almost tempted to go into the old Flemish 
church and invoke the saints there after the 
fashion of the country. One of their pictures on 
the walls becomes, in his imagination, like the 
picture of " Grandmamma," with a smile upon 
its countenance. Delightful dream ! and one of 
good omen. He returns to his hotel, and there 
to his relief, finds the long-expected letter, in the 
well-known hand, addressed to " Mr. M. A. Tit- 
marsh, Lille." He obtains the means of redeem- 
ing his credit, bids farewell to his host without 
any exposure, takes the diligence, and is restored 



and the Ma/ii of Letters, 93 

to his home that evening. Such are the hu- 
mourous exaggerations with which he depicts 
his temporary troubles at Lille, in the shape of 
a ballad, originally intended, we believe, for the 
amusement of his family, but finally inserted in 
" Fraser." 

It was in July, 1844, that Mr. Thackeray 
started on a tour in the East — the result of a 
hasty invitation, and of a present of a free pass 
from a friend connected with the Peninsular 
and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. His 
Budden departure, upon less than thirty-six hours 
notice, is pleasantly detailed in the preface to 
his book, published at Christmas, 1845, with the 
title of " Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to 
Grand Cairo by way of Lisbon, Athens, Constan- 
tinople, and Jerusalem : performed in the steam- 
ers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. 
Bj M. A. Titmarsh, author of The Lish Sketch- 
book," &c. 

The book was illustrated with coloured draw- 
ings by the author, treating, in a not exaggerated 
vein of fun, the peculiarities of the daily life of 
the East. The little book was well received, and 



94 Thackerc(/y / the Humourist 

ill tlie reviews of it tliere is evidence of the grow- 
ing interest of the public in the writer. For the 
first time it presented him to his readers in his 
true name, for though the " Titmarsh " fiction is 
preserved on the title page, the prefatory matter 
is signed " W. M. Thackeray." 

" ' Who is Titmarsh ? ' says one of his critics at 
this time. Such is the ejaculatory formula in which 
public curiosity gives vent to its ignorant impa- 
tience of pseudononymous renown. ' Who is Mi- 
chael Angelo Titmarsh ? ' Such is the note of in- 
terrogation which has been heard at intervals these 
several seasons back, among groups of elderly 
loungers in that row of clubs. Pall-mall ; from 
fairy lips, as the light wheels whirled along the 
row called ' Rotten,' and oft amid keen-eyed men 
in that grand father of rows, which the children 
of literature call Paternoster. * * * 

" This problem has been variously and conflict- 
ingly solved, as in the parallel case of the grim, 
old, stat nominis umbra. There is a hint in both 
instances of some mysterious connexion with the 
remote regions of Bengal, and an erect old pigtail 
of the E.I.C.S., boasts in the ' horizontal ' jimgle 



and the Mem of Letters, 95 

off Hanover-square, of liaving had the dubious 
advantage of his personal acquaintanceship in 
Upper India, where his I O U's were signed 
Major Goliah Gahagan ; and several specimens 
of that documentary character, in good preserva- 
tion, he offers at a low figure to amateurs." 

The foundation in 1841 of a weekly periodical, 
serving as a vehicle for the circulation of the 
lighter papers of humourists, had had unquestion- 
ably an important influence in the development 
of his talents and fame. From an early date he 
was connected with " Punch," at first as the 
" Fat Contributor," and soon after as the author 
of ' Jeames's Diary," and " The Snob Papers." 
If satire could do aught to check the pride of the 
vulgar upstart, or shame social hypocrisy into 
truth and simplicity, these writings would accom- 
plish the task. In fact Thackeray's name was 
now becoming known, and people began to dis- 
tinguish and inquire for his contributions ; his 
illustrations in " Punch " being as funny as his 
articles were. The series called " Jeames's Diary " 
caused gi'eat amusement and no little flutter in 
high polite circles, for the dej)osition from the 



\ 



96 Thackeray / th£> Humourist 

throne of railwaydom of the famous original of 
" Jeames de la Pluclie " had hardly then begun, 
though it was probably accelerated by the uni- 
versal titters of recognition which welcomed the 
weekly accounts of the changing fortunes of 
" Jeames." 

The great work, however, which was to stamp 
the name of Thackeray for ever in the minds of 
English readers was yet to come. Hitherto all his 
writings had been brief and desultory ; but in con- 
tributing to magazines his style had gradually 
matured itself. That ease of expression, and that 
repose which seems so full of power, were never 
more exemplified than in some of his latest essays 
in " Eraser," before book writing had absorbed 
all his time. His article on Sir E. B. Lytton's 
"Memoir of Laman Blanchard," his paper "On 
Illustrated Children's Books," his satirical pro- 
posal to Mons. Alexandre Dumas for a continua- 
tion of " Ivanhoe," all contributed to " Eraser " 
in 1846, and his article — we believe the last 
which he wrote for that periodical, entitled " A 
Grumble about Christmas Books," published in 
January, 1847, are equal to anything in his later 



and the Man of Letters. 97 

works. The first-mentioned of these papers, 
indeed — the remonstrance with Laman Blan- 
chard's biographer is unsurpassed for the elo- 
quence of its defence of the calling of men of 
letters, and for the tenderness and manly simpli- 
city with which it touches on the history of the 
unfortunate subject of the memoir. 

" Mrs. Perkins's Ball," a Christmas Book, was 
published in December, 184:6. But its author had 
long been preparing for a more serious under- 
taking ; some time before, he had sketched some 
chapters entitled " Pencil Sketches of English 
Society," which he had offered to the late Mr. 
Colburn for insertion in the " IlTew Monthly 
Magazine." It formed a portion of a continuous 
story, of a length not yet determined, and was 
rejected by Mr. Colburn after consideration. The 
papers which Mr. Tliackeray had contributed to 
the " ISTew Monthly " were chiefly slight comic 
stories — perhaps the least favourable specimens of 
his powers. They were, indeed, not inferior to 
the common run of magazine papers, and were 
certainly not equal to his contributions to 
" Eraser." In fact, as a contributor to the " l^ew 



98 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Monthly," he had achieved no remarkable success, 
and his papers appear to have been little in de- 
mand there. Whether the manuscript had been 
offered to " Fraser " — the magazine in which 
" Titmarsh " had secured popularity, and where he 
was certainly more at home, we cannot say. 
Happily, the author of " Pencil Sketches of Eng- 
lish Society," though suspending his projected 
work, did not abandon it. He saw in its opening 
chapters — certainly not the best portions of the 
story when completed — the foundations of a work 
which was to secure him at last a fame among 
contemporary writers in his own proper name. 
The success of Mr. Dickens's shilling monthly 
parts suggested to him to make it the commence- 
ment of a substantive work of fiction, to be pub- 
lished month by month, with illustrations by the 
author. The work grew up by degrees, and finally 
took shape under the better title of " Yanity 
Fair." It was during this time, the latter part 
of 1846, that he removed to his house, at No. 
13, Young-street, Kensington, a favourite locality 
with him, in which house he resided for some 
years. He also at tliis time occupied chambers at 



amd the Man of Letters. 99 

No. 10, Crown-office-row, Temple, the comfortable 
retirement in wliich " up four pair of stairs, with 
its grand view, when the sun was shining, of the 
chimnej-pots over the way," he has himself de- 
scribed. His friend, Mr. Tom Taylor, the well- 
known dramatist and biographer, had chambers in 
the same house ; and we believe, on the demolition 
of No. 10, Crown-office-row, wrote a poem, publish- 
ed in the pages of" Punch," in which, if we remem- 
ber rightly, mention is. made of the fact of Thack- 
eray's having resided there. Mr. Thackeray was 
called to the bar by the Hon. Society of the Mid- 
dle Temple, in 1848, though he never practised, and 
never probably intended to do so. The Benchers, 
however, were not insensible to the addition to the 
numerous literary associations with their venerable 
and quiet retreat which they thus gained. After 
h's death, there w. s some proposition to bury him 
in the Temple, of which he was a member, amid 

Those bricky towers 
The which on Thames' broad back do ride 
Where now the student lawyers have their bowers, 
Where whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

There Goldsmith is buried, and Thackeray's ashes 



100 Thackeray y the Humourist 

would have been fitly laid near those of the author 
of the " Yicar of Wakefield," whose brilliant 
genius he so heartily eulogised, and whose many 
shortcomings he so tenderly touched upon in the 
" Lectures on the Humourists." But, after consul- 
tation with his family it was deemed better that 
he should rest with his own people in Kensal 
Green. Pending this decision, the sanction of the 
Benchers to interment within the precincts of the 
Temple Church had been asked and cheerfully 
accorded, and when the Kensal Green Cemetery 
was finally decided upon, the Benchers were 
requested to permit the erection of a memorial 
slab in their church. Their reply to this was, 
that not only should they be honoured by such a 
memento, but that, if allowed, they would have it 
erected at their own cost.* 

* Letter of Mr. Edmund Yates in tlie Belfast Wliig. 



and the Man of Letters. 101 



CHAPTEE ly. 

VAmTY FAIR — FIRST MONTHLY NUMBER — NOTICES OF THE 
EDINBURGH REVIEW — A LITTLE CHRISTMAS BOOK — LET- 
TER ON THE DIGNITY OF LITERATURE — ANNOYED BY 
ADVERSE CRITICISM — NOTICE OF THE TIMES CRITIQUE — 
BEGINS TO DELIVER LECTURES — HIS SUCCESS — ^LEC- 
TURES IN AMERICA — HIS SUCCESS — NOTICES OP NEWS- 
PAPERS — PREFACE TO AN AMERICAN EDITION OF HIS 
WORKS — PUBLICATION OF HENRY ESMOND — INCIDENT IN 
CONNEXION WITH THE PUBLICATION OP THE NEWCOMES 
— SECOND JOURNEY TO THE UNITED STATES — LECTURES 
ON THE " GEORGES " — ADDRESS TO THE ELECTORS OF 
OXFORD — THE ELECTION — THACKERAY AND DICKENS — 
CORRESPONDENCE. 

The first monthly portion of " Yanity Fair " was 
publislied on the 1st of February, 1847, in the 
yellow wrapper which served to distinguish it 
from Mr. Dickens's stories, and which afterwards 
became the standard colour for the monthly 
wrappers of Mr. Thackeray's stories. The work 
was continued monthly, and finished with the 
number for July of the following year. The 



102 TTtackeray / the Humourist 

friends of Mr. Thackeray, and all those who had 
watched his career with special interest, saw in it 
at once a work of greater promise than any that 
had appeared since the dawn of Mr. Dickens's 
fame ; but the critical journals received it some- 
what coldly. One of the most influential of these 
journals, in the first numbers, perhaps, indicates 
best the tone of its reception at this early period. 
It is generally acknowledged that, to the 
thoughtful and appreciative article in the " Edin- 
burgh Eeview " of January, 1848, reviewing the 
first eleven numbers of the work only, is due the 
merit of first authoritatively calling attention to 
the great power it displayed. The writer was 
evidently one who knew Mr. Thackeray well ; 
for he gives a sketch of his life, and mentions 
having met him some years before painting in the 
Louvre in Paris. " In forming (says this judicious 
writer) our general estimate of this writer, we 
wish to be understood as referring principally, if 
not exclusively, to ' Yanity Fair ' (a novel in 
monthly parts), though still unfinished ; so im- 
measurably superior, in our opinion, is this to 
'every other known production of his pen. The 



and the Man of Letters. 103 

great charm of this work is its entire freedom 
from mannerism and affectation both in style and 
sentiment — the confiding frankness with which 
the reader is addressed — the thoroughbred care- 
lessness with which the author permits the 
thoughts and feelings suggested by the situations 
to flow in their natural channel, as if conscious 
that nothing mean or unworthy, nothing requiring 
to be shaded, gilded, or dressed up in company 
attire, could fall from him. In a word, the 
book is the work of a gentleman, which is one 
great merit ; and not the work of a fine (or 
would-be fi.ne) gentleman, which is another. Then, 
again, he never exhausts, elaborates, or insists too 
much upon anything ; he drops his finest remarks 
and happiest illustrations as Buckingham dropped 
his pearls, and leaves them to be picked up and 
appreciated as chance may bring a discriminating 
observer to the spot. His effects are uniformly 
the effects of sound, wholesome, legitimate art ; 
and we need hardly add, that we are never har- 
rowed up with physical horrors of the Eugene 
Sue school in his writings, or that there are no 
melodramatic villains to be found in them. One 



104 Thackeray / the Humourist 

toucli of nature makes the whole world kin, and 
here are touches of nature by the dozen. His 
pathos (though not so deep as Mr. Dickens') is 
exquisite ; the more so, perhaps, because he seems 
to struggle against it, and to be half ashamed of 
being caught in the melting mood ; but the 
attempt to be caustic, satirical, ironical, or philo- 
sophical, on such occasions, is. uniformly vain ; 
and again and again have we found reason to 
admire how an originally fine and kind nature 
remains essentially free from worldliness, and, in 
the highest pride of intellect, pays homage to the 
heart." 

It wms at this time that his friend Mr. Hannay 
tells us that he first had the pleasure of seeing 
him. " ^ Yanity Fair,' " he adds, " was then 
unfinished, but its success was made ; and he 
spoke frankly and genially of his work and his 
career. ' Yanity Fair,' always, we think, ranked 
in his own mind as best in story of his greater 
books ; and he once pointed out to us the very 
house in Kussell-square where his imaginary 
Sedleys lived — a curious proof of the reality his 
creations had for his mind." The same writer 



and the Man of Letters. 105 

tells us that when lie congratulated him, many 
years ago, on the touch in " Yanity Fair " in which 
Becky admires her husband when he is giving 
Lord Steyne the chastisement which ruins her for 
life, the author answered with that fervour as 
well as heartiness of frankness which distinguished 
him : — " Well, when I wrote the sentence, I 
slapped my fist on the table, and said, ' That is a 
touch of genius ! ' " '' Vanity Fair " soon after- 
wards rose rapidly in public favour, and a new 
work from the pen of its author was eagerly 
looked for. 

During the time of publication of " Yanity 
Fair" he had found time to write and publish 
the little Christmas book entitled " Our Street," 
which appeared in December, 1847, and reached 
a second edition soon after Christmas. " Yanity 
Fair" was followed in 1849 with another long 
work of fiction, entitled the " History of Pen- 
dennis ; his Fortunes and MisforMnes, his Friends 
and his Greatest Enemy ; with Illustrations by the 
Author ; " which was completed in two volumes. 
In this year, too, he published " Dr. Birch "and 
" Kebecca and Eowena." It was during the pub- 
6* 



106 ThacTceray / the Hutnourist 



lication of " Pendennis " that a criticism in the 
Morning Chronicle and in the Examiner news- 
papers drew from him the following remarkable 
letter on the " Dignity of Literature," addressed 
to the Editor of the latter journal : — 

''Reform Club, Jan. Sth, 1850. 

" To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle. 

" SiEj — In a leading article of your journal of 
Thursday the 3rd instant you commented upon 
literary pensions and the status of literary men in 
this country, and illustrated your argument by 
extracts from the story of ' Pendennis,' at present 
in course of publication. You have received my 
writings with so much kindness tbat, if you have 
occasion to disapprove of them or the author, I 
can't question your right to blame me, or doubt 
for a moment the friendliness and honesty of my 
critic ; and however I might dispute the justice 
of your verdict in my case, I had proposed to 
submit to it in silence, being indeed very quiet 
in my conscience with regard to the charge made 
against me. But another newspaper of high 
character and repute takes occasion to question 
the principles advocated in your article of Thurs- 



and the Man of Letters. 107 

day ; arguing in favour of pensions for literary 
persons, as you argued against them ; and the 
only point upon which the Examiner and the 
Chronicle appear to agree unluckily regards my- 
self, who am offered up to general reprehension 
in two leading articles by the two writers : by the 
latter, for ' fostering a baneful prejudice ' against 
literary men ; by the former, for ' stooping to 
flatter ' this prejudice in the public mind, and con- 
descending to caricature (as is too often my habit) 
my literary fellow-laboui-ers, in order to pay court 
to ' the non-literary class.' The charges of the 
Examiner against a man who has never, to his 
knowledge, been ashamed of his profession, or 
(except for its dullness) of any single line from his 
pen — grave as they are, are, I hope, not proven. 
' To stoop to flatter' any class is a novel accusa-' 
tion brought against my writings ; and as for my 
scheme, ' to pay court to the non-literary class by 
disparaging my literary fellow-labourers,' it is a 
design which would exhibit a degree not only of 
baseness but of folly upon my part, of which, I 
trust, I am not capable. The editor of the 
Examiner may, perhaps, occasionally write, like 



108 Thackeray / the Humourist 

otlier author s, in a hurry, and not be aware of the 
condusions to which some of his sentences may 
lead. If I stoop to flatter anybody's prejudice for 
some interested motives of my own, I am no more 
nor less than a rogue and a cheat : which deduc- 
tions from the Examiner'^s premises I will not 
stoop to contradict, because the premises them- 
selves are simply absurd. I deny that the con- 
siderable body of our countrymen described by 
the Examiner as ' the non-literary class ' has the 
least gratification in witnessing the degradation or 
disparagement of literary men. Why accuse * the 
non-literary class ' of being so ungrateful % If the 
writings of an author give a reader pleasure or 
profit, surely the latter will have a favourable 
opinion of the person who so benefits him. What 
intelligent man, of what political views, would not 
receive with respect and welcome that writer of 
the Examiner of whom your paper once said, that 
* he made all England laugh and think ? ' Who 
would deny to the brilliant wit, that" polished 
satirist, his just tribute of respect and admiration ? 
Does any man who has written a book worth 
reading — any poet, historian, novelist, man of 



a/ifid the Man of Letters. 109 

science — lose reputation by his cliaracter for 
genius or for learning? Does he not, on the 
contrary, get friends, sympathy, applause — money, 
perhaps ? — all good and pleasant things in them- 
selves, and not ungenerously awarded as they are 
honestly won. Tliat generous faith in men of 
letters, that kindly regard in which the whole 
reading nation holds them, appear to me to be so 
clearly shown in our country every day, that to 
question them would be as absurd as, permit me 
to say for my part, it would be ungrateful. 
What is it that fills mechanics' institutes in the 
great provincial towns when literary men are 
invited to attend their festivals ? Has not every 
literary man of mark his friends and his circle, 
his hundreds or his tens of thousands of readers ? 
And has not every one had from these constant 
and affecting testimonials of the esteem in which 
they hold him ? It is of course one writer's lot, 
from the nature of his subject or of his genius, to 
command the sympathies or awaken the curiosity 
of many more readers than shall choose to listen 
to another author ; but surely all get their hear- 
ing. The literary profession is not held in dis- 



110 Thackeray / the Humourist 

repute ; nobody wants to disparage it ; no man 
loses his social rank, whatever it may be, by prac- 
tising it. On the contrary, the pen gives a j)lace 
in the world to men who had none before — a fair 
place fairly achieved by their genius ; as any other 
degree of eminence is by any other kind of merit. 
Literary men need not, as it seems to me, be in 
the least querulous about their position any more, 
or want the pity of anybody. The money-prizes 
which the chief among them get are not so high 
as those which fall to men of other callings — to 
bishops, or to judges, or to opera-singers and 
actors ; nor have they received stars and garters 
as yet, or peerages and governorships of islands, 
such as fall to the lot of military officers. The 
rewards of the profession are not to be measured 
by the money-standard : for one man spends a 
life of learning and labour on a book which does 
not pay the printer's bill, and another gets a little 
fortune by a few light volumes. But, putting the 
money out of the question, I believe that the 
social estimation of the man of letters is as good 
as it deserves to be, and as good as that of any 
other professional man. With respect to the 



aiid the Man of Letters, 111 

question in debate between jou and the Exam- 
iner as to the propriety of public rewards and 
honours for literary men, I don't see why men 
of letters should not very cheerfully coincide with 
Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours, 
places, and prizes which they can get. The 
amount of such as will be awarded to them will 
not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the 
country much ; and if it is the custom of the State 
to reward by money, or titles of honour, or stars 
and garters of any sort, individuals who do the 
country service, and if individuals are gratified at 
having ^ Sir"' or ' M}^ lord ' appended to their 
names, or stars and ribands hooked on their coats 
and waistcoats, as men most undoubtedly are, and 
as their wives, families, and relations are, there 
can be no reason why men of letters should not 
have the chance, as well as men of the robe or the 
sword ; or why, if honour and money are good for 
one profession, they should not be good for another. 
No man in other callings tTiinks himself degraded 
by receiving a reward from his Government ; nor, 
surely, need the literary man be more squeamish 
about pensions, and ribands, and titles, than the 



112 Thackeray y the Humourist 

ambassador, or general, or judge. Every European 
State but ours rewards its men of letters ; the 
American Government gives them their full share 
of its small patronage ; and if Americans, why 
not Englishmen ? If Pitt Crawley is disappointed 
at not getting a riband on retiring from his diplo- 
matic post at Pumpernickel, if General O'Dowd 
is pleased to be called Sir Hector O'Dowd, K.C.B., 
and his wife at being denominated my Lady 
O'Dowd, are literary men to be the only persons 
exempt from vanity, and is it to be a sin in them 
to covet honour ? And now, with regard to the 
charge against myself of fostering baneful preju- 
dices against our calling — to which I no more 
plead guilty than I should think Fielding would 
have done if he had been accused of a design to 
bring the Church into contempt by describing 
Parson Trulliber — permit me to say, that before 
you deliver sentence it would be as well if you had 
waited to hear the whole of the argument. Who 
knows what is coming in the future numbers of 
the work which has incurred your displeasure and 
the JExaminer^s, and whether you, in accusing me 
of prejudice, and thG&aminer, (alas !) of swindling 



and the Man of Letters, 113 

and flattering the public, have not been prematiu-e ? 
Time and the hour may solve this mystery, for 
which the candid reader is referred ' to our next.' 
That I have a prejudice against running into debt, 
and drunkenness, and disorderly life, and against 
quackery and falsehood in my profession, I own ; 
and that I like to have a laugh at those pretenders 
in it who wi'ite confidential news about fashion 
and politics for provincial gobemouches ; but I am 
not aware of feeling any malice in describing this 
weakness, or of doing anything wrong in exposing 
the former vices. Have they never existed amongst 
literary men ? Have their talents never been urged 
as a plea for improvidence, and their very faults 
adduced as a consequence of their genius ? The 
only moral that 1, as a writer, wished to hint in 
the descriptions against which you protest, was, 
that it was the duty of a literary man, as well as 
any other, to practise regularity and sobriety, to 
love his family, and to pay his tradesman, l^or 
is the picture I have drawn ^ a caricature which 
I condescend to,' any more than it is a wilful and 
insidious design on my part to flatter ' the non- 
literary class.' K it be a caricature, it is the 



114: Thackeray / the Humourist 

result of a natural perversity of yision, not of an 
artful desire to mislead : but my attempt was to 
tell the truth, and I meant to tell it not unkindly. 
I have seen the bookseller v^hom Bludyer robbed 
of his books : I have carried money, and from a 
noble brother man-of-letters, to some one not un- 
like Shandon in prison, and have watched the 
beautiful devotion of his wife in that dreary place. 
Why are these things not to be described, if they 
illustrate, as they appear to me to do, that strange 
and awful struggle of good and wrong which takes 
place in our hearts and in the world % It may be 
that I worked out my moral ill, or it may be pos- 
sible that the critic of the Examiner fails in ap- 
prehension. My efforts as an artist come perfectly 
within his province as a censor ; but when Mr. 
Examiner says of a gentleman that he is ' stoop- 
ing to flatter a public prejudice,' which public 
prejudice does not exist, I submit that he makes 
a charge which is as absurd as it is unjust ; and 
am thankful that it repels itself. And, instead of 
accusing the public of persecuting and disparaging 
us as a class, it . seems to me that men of letters 
had best silently assume that they are as good as 



and the Man of Letters. 116 

any other gentlemen, nor raise piteous controver- 
sies upon a question wliicli all people of sense 
must take to be settled. If I sit at your table, I 
suppose that I am my neighbour's equal as that 
he is mine. If I begin straightway with a protest 
of ' Sir, I am a literary man, but I would have you 
to know I am as good as you,' which of us is it 
that questions the dignity of the literary profes- 
sion — my neighbour who would like to eat his 
soup in quiet, or the man of letters who com- 
mences the argument ? And I hope that a comic 
writer, because he describes one author as im- 
provident, and another as a parasite, may not 
only be guiltless of a desire to vilify his profes- 
sion, but may really have its honour at heart. 
olf there are no spendthrifts or parasites amongst 
us, the satire becomes unjust ; but if such exist, 
or have existed, they are as good subjects for 
comedy as men of other callings. I never 
heard that the Bar felt itself as^o:rieved because 
* Punch ' chose to describe Mr. Dunup's noto- 
rious state of insolvency, or that the picture of 
Stiggins in ' Pickwick ' was intended as an in- 
sult to all Dissenters, or that all the attorneys in 



116 Thackeray / the Humourist 

the empire were indignant at the famous history 
of the firm of ^ Quirk, Gammon, and Snap ; ' are 
we to be passed over because we are faultless, or 
because we cannot afford to be laughed at ? And 
if every character in a story is to represent a 
class, not an individual — if every bad figure is to 
have its obliged contrast of a good one, and a 
balance of vice and virtue is to be struck — novels, 
I think, would become impossible, as they would 
be intolerably stupid and unnatural, and there 
would be a lamentable end of writers and readers 
of such compositions. 

" Believe me. Sir, to be your very faithfal 
Servant, 

" W. M. Thackeeay." 

It was a peculiarity of Mr. Thackeray to feel 
annoyed at adverse criticism, and to show his an- 
noyance in a way which more cautious men gene- 
rally abstain from. He did not conceal his feel- 
ing when an imjust attack was levelled at him 
in an influential journal. He was not one of 
those remonstrators who never see anything in 
the papers, but have their '' attention called " to 
them by friends. If he had seen, he frankly 



aiid the Man of Letters, 111 

avowed that he had seen the attack, and did not 
scruple to reply if he had an opportunity, and 
the influence of the journal or reviewer made it 
worth while, and with the Times he had very 
early had a bout of this kind. When the little 
account of the funeral of Napoleon in 1840 was 
published, the Times ^ as he said, rated him, and 
talked in '' its own great roaring way about the 
flippancy and conceit of Titmarsh," to which he 
had replied by a sharp paragraph or two. In 
1850 a more elaborate attack in the chief journal 
roused his satirical humour more completely. 
The article which contained the offence was on 
the subject of his Christmas Book, entitled " The 
Knickleburys on the Rhine," published in Dec. 
1850, upon which a criticism appeared in that 
journal, beginning with the following passage : — 
" It has been customary, of late years, for the 
purveyors of amusing literature — the popular au- 
thors of the day — to put forth certain opuscules, 
denomiuated ' Christmas Books,' with the osten- 
sible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, 
or other expansive emotions, incident upon the 
exodus of the old and the inauguration of the 



118 Thackeray / the Humourist 

new year. We have said that their ostensible in- 
tention was such, because there is another motive 
for these productions, locked up (as the popular 
author deems) in his own breast, but which be- 
trays itself, in the quality of the work, as his 
principal incentive. Oh ! that any muse should 
be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and 
balance a ledger ! Yet so it is ; and the popular 
author finds it convenient to fill up the declared 
deficit and place himself in a position the more 
efliectually to encounter those liabilities which 
sternly assert themselves contemporaneously and 
in coiitrast .with the careless and free-handed ten- 
dencies of the season by the emission of Christ- 
mas books — a kind of literary assignats^ repre- 
senting to the emitter expunged debts, to the 
receiver an investment of enigmatical value. For 
the most paii; bearing the stamp of their origin 
in the vacuity of the writer's exchequer rather 
than in the fullness of his genius, they suggest by 
their feeble flavour the rinsings of a void brain 
after the more important concoctions of the ex- 
pired year. Indeed, we should as little think of 
taking these compositions as examples of the 



and the Man of Letters, 119 

merits of their authors as we should think of 
measuring the valuable services of Mr. Walker, 
the postman, or Mr. Bell, the dust-collector, by 
the copy of verses they leave at our doors as a 
provocative of the expected annual gratuity — 
effusions with which they may fairly be classed 
for their intrinsic worth no less than their ulti- 
* mate purport." 

Upon this, and upon some little peculiarities 
of style in the review, such as a passage in which 
the learned critic compared the author's satirical 
attempts to the sardonic divings after the pearl 
of truth, whose lustre is eclipsed in the display 
of the diseased oyster, Mr. Thackeray replied in 
the preface to a second edition of the little book, 
published a few days later, and entitled " An 
Essay on Thunder and Small Beer." The style 
of the Times critique, which was generally attri- 
buted to the late Mr. Samuel Phillips, afforded 
too tempting a subject for the satirical pen of the 
author of " Yanity Fair " to be passed over. The 
easy humour with which he exposed the pompous 
affectation of superiority in his critic, the tawdry 
style and di'oU logic of his censor, whom he 



120 ThackeroAj / the Humourist 

likened not to the awful tliunderer of Printing 
House-square, but to the thundei-er's man " Jupi- 
ter Jeames, trying to dazzle and roar like his 
awful employer," afforded the town, through the 
newspapers which copied the essay, an amount 
of amusement not often derived from an author's 
defence of himself from adverse criticism. The 
essay was remembered long after, when work 
after work of Mr. Thackeray was severely han- 
dled in the same paper, and the recollection of 
it gave a shadow of support to the theory by 
which some persons, on the recent occasion of 
Mr. Thackeray's death, endeavoured to explain 
the fact that the obituary notice in the Times^ 
and the account of his funeral, were more curt 
than those of any other journal, while the Times 
alone, of all the daily papers, omitted to insert 
a leading article on the subject of the great loss 
which had been sustained by the world of 
letters. 

In 1851, Mr. Thackeray appeared in an entirely 
new character, but one which subsequently proved 
so lucrative to him, that to this cause, even more 
than the labours of his pen, must be attributed 



cmd the Man of Letters. 121 

that easy fcai^uue whicli lie had accumulated before 
he died. In May of that year he commenced a 
series of lectures on the English Humourists. The 
subjects were, Swift ; Congreve and Addison ; 
Steele ; Prior, Gay, and Pope ; Hogarth, SmoUet 
and Fielding, and Sterne and Goldsmith. The 
lectures were delivered at Willis's Rooms. The 
price of admission was high, and his audience 
was numerous, and of the most select kind. It 
was not composed of that sort of people who 
crowd to pick up information in the shape of 
facts with which they have been previously unac- 
quainted, but those who, knowing the eminence 
of the lecturer, wished to hear his opinion on a 
subject of national interest. One of the two 
great humourists of the present age was about to 
utter his sentiments on the humourists of the age 
now terminated, and the occasion was sufficient 
to create an interest which not even the attractive 
power of the Great Exhibition, then open, could 
check. The newspapers complained slightly of 
the low key in which the lecturer spoke, from 
which cause many of his best points were some- 
times lost to the more distant of his auditors, 
6 



122 Thackeray / the Humourist 

" In other respects," says tlie TimeSy " we can- 
not too highly praise the style of his delivery." 
Abstaining from rant and gesticulation, he relied 
for his effect too on the matter which he uttered, 
and it was singular to see how the isolated 
pictures, which by a few magic touches descended 
into the hearts of his hearers. Among the most 
conspicuous of the literary ladies at this gathering 
was Miss Bronte, the authoress of " Jane Eyre." 
She had never before seen the author of " Yanity 
Fair," though the second edition of her own 
celebrated novel was dedicated to him by her, 
with the assurance that she regarded him " as 
the social regenerator of his day — as the very 
master of that working corps who would restore 
to rectitude the warped state of things." Mrs. 
Gaskell tells us that, when the lecture was over, 
the lecturer descended from the platform, and 
making his way towards her, frankly asked her 
for her opinion. "This," adds Miss Bronte's 
biographer, " she mentioned to me not many days 
afterwards, adding remarks almost identical with 
those which I subsequently read in ' Yillette,' 
where a similar action on the part of M. Paul 



OMci the Man of Letters, 123 



Emanuel is related." The remarks of this sin- 
gular woman upon Mr. Thackeray and his writ- 
ings, and her accounts of her interviews with 
him, are curious : they will be found scattered 
about Mrs. Gaskell's popular biography. Read- 
ers of the " Comhill Magazine " will not have 
forgotten Mr. Thackeray's affectionate and dis- 
criminating sketch of her, which appears some 
years later in that periodical. 

The course was perfectly successful, and the 
Lectures, subsequently reprinted, rank among the 
most beautiful writings. They were delivered 
again soon afterwards in some of the provincial 
cities, including Edinburgh. A droll anecdote 
was related at this period in the newspapers, in 
connection with these provincial appearances. 

Previously to delivering them in Scotland, the 
lecturer bethought himself of addressing them to 
the rising youth of our two great nurseries of the 
national mind ; and it was necessary, before ap- 
pearing at Oxford, to obtain the license of the 
authorities — a very laudable arrangement of 
course. The Duke of Wellington was the Chan- 
cellor, who, if applied to would doubtless have 



124 Thackeray / the HwnyyuHd 

understood at once the man and liis business. 
The Duke lives in the broad atmosphere of the 
every-day world, and a copy of the " Snob Papers " 
is on a snug shelf at "Walmer Castled But his 
dignity at Oxford, on whom the modest applicant 
waited, knew less about such trifles as " Yanity 
Fair " and " Pendennis." " Pray what can I do 
to serve you, sir ? '' inquired the bland functionary. 
" My name is Thackeray." " So I see by this 
card." " I seek permission to lecture within the 
precincts." " Ah ! you are a lecturer ; what 
subjects do you undertake — religious or polit- 
ical ? " " Neither ; I am a literary man." 
" Have you written anything ? " " Yes ; I am 
the author of ' Yanity Fair.' " '' I presume a 
dissenter — has that anything to do with John 
Bunyan's book % " " Not exactly ; I have also 
written ' Pendennis.' " " Never heard of these 
works ; but no doubt they are proper books." " I 
have also contributed to ' Punch.' " " ' Punch ! ' 
I have heard of that ; is it not a ribald publica- 
tion ? " 

An invitation to deliver the lectures in 
America speedily followed. The public interest 



omd the Man of Letters. 125 

which heralded his coming in the United States 
was such as could hardly have been expected for 
a writer of fiction, who had won his fame by so 
little appeal to the love of exciting scenes. 

His visit (as an American critic remarked,) 
at least demonstrated, that if they were unwilling 
to pay English authors for their books, they were 
ready to reward them handsomely for the oppor- 
tunity of seeing and hearing them. 

At first, the public feeling on the other side of 
the Atlantic had been very much divided as to 
Ids probable reception. " He'll come and humbug 
us, eat our dinners, pocket our money, and go 
home and abuse us, like Dickens," said Jonathan, 
chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball 
at the Pai-k Theatre, and the Boz tableaux, and 
the universal wining and dining, to which the 
author of '' Pickwick " was subject while he was 
our guest. '^ Let him have his say," said others, 
" and we will have our look. We will pay a 
dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same 
time ; and as for the abuse, why it takes even 
more than two such cubs of the roaring British 
lion to frighten the American eagle. Let him 



126 Thackeray / the Hmnourist 

come, and give liim fair play." He did come, 
and certainly had his fair play. There was cer- 
tainly no disappointment with his lectures. Those 
who knew his books found the author in the lec- 
turer. Those who did not know the books, says 
one critic, '' were charmed in the lecturer by 
what is charming in the author, the unaffected 
humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the 
genial play of fancy, and the sad touch of truth, 
with that glancing stroke of satire, which, light- 
ning-like, illumines while it withers." He did 
not visit the West, nor Canada. He went home 
without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he 
did go, he found a generous social welcome, and 
a respectful and sympathetic hearing. He 
came to fulfil no mission ; but it was felt that his 
visit had knit more closely the sympathy of the 
Americans with Englishmen. Heralded by various 
romantic memoirs, he smiled at them, stoutly as- 
serted that he had been always able to command 
a good dinner, and to pay for it ; nor did he seek 
to disguise that he hoped his American tour 
would help him to command and pay for more. 
He promised not to write a book about the 
Americans, and he kept his word. 



and the Man of Letters. 127 



His first lecture was delivered to a crowded 
audience. On the 19tli of !N"ovember, he com- 
menced his lectures before the Mercantile Library 
Association, in the spacious iN'ew York Church 
belonging to the congregation presided over by 
the Rev. Dr. Chapin. 

Before many days, the publishers told the 
world that the subject of Mr. Thackeray's talk 
had given start to a Swift and Congreve and 
Addison furor. The booksellers were driving a 
thrifty trade in forgotten volumes of " Old Eng- 
lish Essayists ; " the " Spectator " found its way 
again to the parlour-tables ; old " Sir Roger de 
Coverley" was waked up from his long sleep. 
" Tristram Shandy " even, was almost forgiven his 
lewdness ; and the " Ass of Melun," and poor Le 
Fevre were studied wistfully, and placed on the 
library-table between " Gulliver " and the " Rake's 
Progress." Girls were working Maria's pet lamb 
upon their samplers ; and hundreds of Lilliput 
literary ladies were twitching the mammoth Gul- 
liver's whiskers. 

The newspaper gossippers were no less busy in 
noting every personal characteristic of the author. 



128 Thackeray / the Humourist 

One remarks : — " As for the man himself who has 
inoculated us, he is a stout, healthful, broad- 
shouldered specimen of a man, with cropped 
greyish hair, and keenish grey eyes, peering very 
shai'ply through a pair of spectacles that have a 
very satirical focus. He seems to stand strongly 
on his own feet, as if he would not be easily blown 
about or upset, either by praise or pugilists ; a 
man of good digestion, who takes the world easy, 
and scents all shams and humours (straightening 
them between his thumb and forefinger) as he 
would a pinch of snuff." A London letter of the 
time says ; — " The !N"ew York Journalists preserve, 
on the whole, a delicate silence (very creditable 
to them) on the subject of Mr. Thackeray's nose ; 
but they are eloquent about his legs ; and when 
the last mail left, a controversy was raging among 
them on this matter, one party maintaining that 
* he stands very firm on his legs,' while the 
opposition asserted that his legs were decidedly 
' shaky.' " 

These, however, were light matters compared 
with the notices in other newspapers which un- 
scrupulously raked together, for the amusement 



and the Man of Letters. 129 



of their readers, details which were mostly untrue, 
and where true, were of too private a character 
for public discussion. This led to a humorous 
remonstrance, forwarded by Mr. Thackeray to 
" Fraser's Magazine," where it appeared with the 
signature of " John Small." In this he gave a 
droll parody of his newspaper biographers' style, 
which caused some resentment on the part of the 
writers attacked. One transatlantic defender of 
the New York press said that "the two most 
personal accounts of Thackeray published appear- 
ed inxsome Liverpool paper, and in the London 
Spectator ; " adding, " the London correspondents 
of some of the provincial papers spare nothing 
of fact or comment touching the private life of 
public characters. ISTay, are there not journals 
expressly devoted to the contemporary biography 
of titled, wealthy, and consequential personages, 
which will tell you how, and in what company, 
they eat, drink, and travel ; their itinerary from 
the country to London, and from tbe metropolis 
to the Continent ; the probable marriages, alli- 
ances, &c. ? ll^o journal can be better acquainted 
with these conditions of English society than the 



130 Thackeray / the Humourist 

classical and vivacious * Fraser.' Why, then, does 
John Small address that London editor from New 
York, converting some paltry and innocent-enough 
penny-a-liner notice of the author of ' Yanity Fair ' 
into an enormous national sin and delinquency." 

Among the lectures delivered at l^ew York, 
before he quitted the gay circles of that Empire 
City for Boston, was one in behalf of a charity ; 
and the charity lecture was stated to be a melange 
of all the others, closing very appropriately with 
an animated tribute to the various, literary, social, 
and humane qualities of Mr. Charles Dickens. 
" Papa," he describes his daughter as exclaiming, 
" Papa, I Kke Mr. Dickens's book much better 
than yours." 

The remonstrance of John Small in " Fraser," 
however, did not conclude without a warm acknow- 
ledgment of the general kindness he had received 
in America, so beautifully expressed in his last 
lecture of the series, delivered on the 7th of April. 
" In England," he said, " it was my custom, after 
the delivery of these lectures, to point such a moral 
as seemed to befit the country I lived in, and to 
protest against an outcry which some brother 



and the Man of Letters. 131 

authoi*s of mine most imprudently and imjustly 
raise, when tliey say that our })i*ofession is neg- 
lected and its professors held in light esteem. 
Speaking in this country, I would say that such 
a complaint could not only not be advanced, but 
could not even be understood here, where your 
men of letters take their manly share in public 
life ; whence Everett goes as minister to Wash- 
ington, and Irving and Bancroft to represent the 
republic in the old country. And if to English 
authors the English public is, as I believe, kind and 
just in the main, can any of us say, will any who 
visit your country not proudly and gratefully 
own, with what a cordial and generous greeting 
vou receive us ? I look around on this ^reat 
company. L think of my gallant young patrons 
of the Mercantile Library Association, as whose 
servant I appear before you, and of the kind hand 
stretched out to welcome me by men famous in 
letters, and honoured in our own country as in 
their own, and I thank you and them for a most 
kindly greeting and a most generous hospitality. 
At home and amongst his own people, it scarce 
becomes an English writer to apeak of himself; 



132 Thackera/y / the Humourist 

his public estimation must depend on liis works ; 
his private esteem on his character and his life. 
But here, among friends newly found, I ask leave 
to say that I am thankful ; and I think with a 
grateful heart of those I leave behind me at home, 
who will be proud of the welcome you hold out 
to me, and will benefit, please God, when my 
days of work are over, by the kindness which you 
show to their father." 

A still more interesting paper was his Preface 
to Messrs. Appleton and Co.'s New York edition 
of his minor works. Readers will remember Mr. 
Thackeray's droll account, in one of his lectures, 
of his first interview with the agent of Appleton 
and Co., when holding on, sea-sick, to the bul- 
warks of the New York steam- vessel on his out- 
ward voyage. The preface referred to contains 
evidence that the appeal of the energetic represen- 
tative of that w^ell-known publishing house was 
not altogether fruitless. It is as follows : — 

" On coming into this country I found that the pro- 
jectors of this series of little books had preceded my 
arrival by publishing a number of early works, which 
have appeared under various pseudonyms during the 
last fifteen years. I was not the master to choose what 



and the Man of Letters. 133 



stories of mine should appear or not ; these miscel- 
lanies were all advertised, or in course of publication; 
nor have I had the good fortune to be able to draw a 
pen, or alter a blunder of author or printer, except in 
the case of the accompanying volumes which contain 
contributions to ' Punch,' whence I have been enabled 
to make something like a selection. In the 'Letters 
of Mr. Brown,' and the succeeding short essays and 
descriptive pieces, something graver and less burlesque 
was attempted than in other pieces which I here pub- 
lish. My friend, the ' Fat Contributor,' accompanied 
Mr. Titmarsh in his ' Journey from Cornhill to Cairo.' 
The prize novels contain imitations of the writings of 
some contemporaries who still live and flourish in the 
novelists' calling. I myself had scarcely entered on it 
when these burlesque tales were begun, and stopped 
further parody from a sense that this merry task of 
making fun of the novelists should be left to younger 
hands than my own; and, in a little book published 
some four years since, in England, by my friends 
Messrs. Hannay and Shirley Brooks, I saw a caricature 
of myself and writings to the full, as ludicrous and 
faithful as the prize novels of Mr. Punch. Nor was 
there, had I desired it, any possibility of preventing 
the reappearance of these performances. Other pub- 
lishers, besides the Messrs. Appleton, were ready to 
bring my hidden works to the light. Very many of 
the other books printed, I have not seen since their 
appearance twelve years ago, and it was with no small 
feelings of curiosity (remembering under what sad 
circumstances the tale had been left unfinished) that I 



134 Thackeray / the Humourist 



bought tlie incomplete ' Shabby Genteel Story,' in a 
railway car, on my first journey from Boston hither, 
from a rosy-cheeked, little peripatetic book merchant, 
who called out 'Thackeray's Works,' in such a kind, 
gay voice, as gave me a feeling of friendship and 
welcome. 

" There is an opportunity of being either satiric or 
sentimental. The careless papers written at an early 
period, and never seen since the printer's boy carried 
them away, are brought back and laid at the father's 
door ; and he cannot, if he would, forget or disown his 
own children. 

" "Why were some of the little brats brought out of 
their obscurity ? I own to a feeling of anything but 
pleasure in reviewing some of these misshapen juvenile 
creatures, which the publisher has disinterred and re- 
suscitated. There are two performances especially, 
(among the critical and biographical works of the 
erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which I am very sorry to 
see reproduced ; and I ask pardon of the author of the 
' Caxtons' for a lampoon, which I know he himself has 
forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. 

" I had never seen that eminent writer but once in 
public when this satire was penned, and wonder at the 
recklessness of the young man who could fancy such 
personality was harmless jocularity, and never calcu- 
late that it might give pain. The best exiDcriences of 
my life have been gained since that time of youth and 
gaiety, and careless laughter. I allude to them, per- 
haps, because I would not have any kind and friendly 
American reader judge of me by the wild performance* 



and the Man of Letters. 135 



of early years. Such a retrospect as the sight of these 
old acquaintances perforce occasioned, cannot, if it 
would, be gay. The old scenes return, the remem- 
brance of the bygone time, the chamber in which the 
stories were written, the faces that shone round the 
table. 

" Some biographers in this country have been pleased 
to depict that homely apartment after a very strange 
and romantic fashion ; and an author in the direst 
struggles of poverty, waited upon by a family domestic 
in ' all the splendour of his menial decorations,' has 
been circumstantially described to the reader's amuse- 
ment as well as to the writer's own. I may be per- 
mitted to assure the former that the splendour and 
the want were alike fanciful ; and that the meals were 
not only sufficient but honestly paid for. 

" That extreme liberality with which American 
publishers have printed the works of English authors 
has had at least this beneficial result for us, that our 
names and writings are known by multitudes using 
our common mother tongue, who never had "heard of 
us or our books but for the speculators who have sent 
them all over this continent. 

" It is, of course, not unnatural for the English writer 
to hope that some day he may share a portion of the 
profits which his works bring at present to the persons 
who vend them in this country ; and I am bound 
gratefully to say myself, that since my arrival here I 
have met with several publishing houses who are will- 
ing to acknowledge our little claim to participate in the 
advantages arising out of our books ; and the present 



136 Thackeray y the Huraourist 



writer having long since ascertained that a portion of a 
loaf is more satisfactory than no bread at all, grate- 
fully accepts and acknowledges several slices which the 
book-purveyors in this city have proffered to him of 
their own free-will. 

" If we are not paid in full and in specie as yet, 
English writers surely ought to be thankful for the 
very great kindness and friendliness with which the 
American public receives them ; and if in hope some 
day that measures may pass here to legalize our right 
to profit a little by the commodities which we invent 
and in which we deal, I for one can cheerfully say that 
the good-will towards us from jDublishers and public is 
undoubted, and wait for still better times with perfect 
confidence and humour. 

" If I have to complain of any special hardship, it is, 
not that our favourite works are reproduced, and our 
children introduced to the American jDublic — children 
whom we have educated with care, and in whom we 
take a little paternal pride — but that ancient magazines 
are ransacked, and shabby old articles dragged out, 
which we had gladly left in the wardrobes where they 
have lain hidden many years. There is no control, how- 
ever, over a man's thoughts — once uttered and printed, 
back they may come upon us on any sudden day ; and 
in this collection which Messrs. Appleton are publishing, 
I find two or three such early productions of my own that 
I gladly would take back, but that they have long since 
gone out of the paternal guardianship. 

" If not printed in this series, they would have ap- 
peared from other presses, having not the slightest need 



and the Man of Letters, 137 

of the author's own imprimatur ; and I cannot sufficiently 
condole with a literary gentleman of this city, who (in his 
voyages of professional adventure) came upon an early 
performance of mine, which shall be nameless, carried the 
news of the discovery to a publisher of books, and had 
actually done me the favour to sell my book to that 
liberal man ; when, behold, Messrs. Appleton announced 
the book in the press, and my confrere had to 
refund the prize-money which had been paid to him. 
And if he is a little chagrined at finding other intrepid 
voyagers beforehand with him in taking possession of 
my island, and the American flag already floating there, ho 
will understand the feelings of the harmless but kindly- 
treated aboriginal who makes every sign of peace, who 
smokes the pipe of submission, and meekly acquiesces in 
his own annexation. 

"It is said that those only who win should laugh : I 
think, in this case, my readers will not grudge the losing 
side its share of harmless good-humour. If I have 
contributed to theirs, or provided them with means of 
amusement, I am glad to think my books have found 
favour with the American public, as I am proud to own 
the great and cordial welcome with which they have 
received me. 

" W. M. Thackeray. 

" New York, December, 1852." 

Such words could not fail to be gratifying to 
tlie American people, as an evidence of Thacke- 
ray's sense of the reception he had received, and 



138 Thackeray / the Hummcrist 

in spite of a slight misunderstanding founded on 
a mistake and speedily cleared up, it may be said 
that no English writer of fiction was ever more 
popular in the United States. 

The publication of " The Adventures of Henry 
Esmond," which appeared just as its author was 
starting for America in 1852, marked an impor- 
tant epoch in his career. It was a contiuuous 
story, and one worked out with closer attention to 
the thread of the narrative than he had hitherto 
produced — a fact due, no doubt, partly to its ap- 
pearance in three volumes complete, instead of in 
detached monthly portions. But its most strik- 
ing feature was its elaborate imitation of the style 
and even the manner of thought of the time of 
Queen Anne's reign, in which its scenes were 
laid. The preparation of his Lectures on the 
Humourists had, no doubt, suggested to him the 
idea of writing a story of this kind, as it after- 
wards suggested to him the design of writing a 
history of that period which he had long enter- 
tained, but in which he had, we believe, made no 
progress when he died. But his fondness for the 
Queen Anne writers was of older date. Affec- 



om^d the Man of Letters. 139 

tionate allusions to Sir E-ichard Steele — like liim- 
self a Charterhouse boy — and to Addison, and 
Pope, and Swift, may be found in his earliest 
magazine articles. That the style with which the 
author of " Vanity Fair " and " Pendennis " had 
so often delighted his readers was to some degree 
formed upon those models so little studied in his 
boyhood, cannot be doubted by any one who is 
familiar with the literature of the Augustan age. 
The writers of that period were fond of French 
models, as the writers of Elizabeth's time looked 
to Italy for their literary inspiration ; but there 
was no time when English prose was generally 
written with more pui-ity and ease ; for the trans- 
lation of the Scriptures, which is generally referred 
to as an evidence of the perfection of our English 
speech in Elizabeth's time, owed its strength and 
simplicity chiefly to the rejection by the pious 
translators of the scholarly style most in vogue, 
in favour of the homely English then current 
among the people. If we except the pamphlet 
writers of earlier reigns, the Queen Anne writers 
were the first who systematically wrote for the 
people in plain Saxon English, not easy to imitate 



140 Thackeray / the Humourist 

in these days. " Esmond " was from the first 
most liked among literary men who can appreci- 
ate a style having no resemblance to the fashion 
of the day ; bnt there was a vein of tenderness 
and true pathos in the story which, in spite of 
some objectionable features in the plot, and of a 
somewhat wearisome genealogical introduction, 
have by degrees gained for it a high rank among 
the author's works. " Esmond " was followed by 
'^ The Newcomes," in 1855, a work which re- 
vealed a deeper pathos than any of his previous 
novels, and showed that the author could, when 
he pleased, give us pictures of moral beauty and 
' loveliness. In this work he returned to the yel- 
low numbers in the old monthly form. 

An incident in connection with the publication 
of ^' The Newcomes " may here be mentioned. 
Mr. Thackeray's fondness for irony had frequent- 
ly brought him into disgrace with people not so 
ready as himself for understanding that dangerous 
figure. A passage in one of his chapters of this 
story alluding to " Mr. Washington," in a parody 
of the style of the British Patriot^ of the times of 
the War of Independence, was so far misunder- 
stood in America that the fact was alluded to by 



and the Man of Letters, 141 



the !N"ew York correspondent of tlie Times. Upon 
which Mr. Thackeray addressed the following let- 
ter to that journal : — 

" Sir, — Allow me a word of explanation in answer to a 
strange charge which has been brought against me in the 
United States, and which your New York correspondent 
has made public in this country. 

" In the first number of a periodical story which I am 
now publishing, appears a sentence in which I should nev- 
er have thought of finding any harm until it has been dis- 
covered by some critics over the water. The fatal words 
are these : — 

" ' When pigtails grew on the backs of the British gen- 
try, and their wives wore cushions on their heads, over 
which they tied their own hair, and disguised it with 
powder and pomatum ; when ministers went in their stars 
and orders to the House of Commons, and the orators 
of the opposition attacked nightly the noble lord in the 
blue riband; when Mr. Washington was heading the 
American rebels with a courage, it must be confessed, 
worthy of a better cause, — there came to London, out of 
a northern county, Mr., etc' 

"This paragraph has been interpreted in America 
as an insult to Washington and the whole Union ; and 
from the sadness and gravity with which your corre- 
spondent quotes certain of my words, it is evident he, 
too, thinks they have an insolent and malicious 
meaning. 

"Having published the American critic's comment, 
permit the author of a faulty sentence to say what he 
did mean, and to add the obvious moral of the ajDologue 



142 Thackeray / the Humourist 



which has been so oddly construed. I am speaking of 
a young apprentice coming to London between the years 
1770 and '80, and want to depict a few figures of the 
last century. (The illustrated head-letter of the chapter 
was intended to represent Hogarth's ' Industrious 
Apprentice.') I fancy the old society, with its hoops 
and powder — Barr6 or Fox thundering at Lord North 
asleep on the Treasury bench — the news readers at the 
coffee-room talking over the paper, and owning that 
this Mr. Washington who was leading the rebels, was 
a very courageous soldier, and worthy of a better cause 
than fighting against King George. The images are 
at least natural and pretty consecutive. 1776 — the 
people of London in '76 — the Lords and House of Com- 
mons in '76— Lord North — Washington — ^what the 
people thought about Washington — I am thinking 
about '76. Where, in the name of common sense, is 
the insult to 1853 ? The satire, if satire there be, 
applies to us at home, who called Washington ' Mr. 
Washington ; ' as we called Frederick the Great ' the 
Protestant Hero,' or Napoleon ' The Corsican Tyrant,' 
or ' General Bonaparte.' Need I say, that out officers 
were instructed (until they were taught better manners) 
to call Washington ' Mr. Washington ? ' and that the 
Americans were called rebels during the whole of that 
contest ? Eebels 1 — of course they were rebels ; and I 
should like to know what native American would not 
have been a rebel in that cause ? 

" As irony is dangerous, and has hurt the feelings of 
kind friends whom I would not wish to offend, let me say, 
in perfect faith and gravity, that I think the cause for 



and the Man of Letters. 143 

which Washington fought entirely just and right, and the 
champion the very noblest, purest, bravest, best of God's 
men. 

" I am. Sir, your very faithful servant, 

" W. M. Thackeray. 
" Athenaeum, Nov. 22." 

Anotlier journey to the United States, equally 
sucGessful, and equally profitable in a pecuniary 
sense, was the chief event in his life in 1856. 
The lectui'es delivered were those beautiful anec- 
dotical and reflective discourses on the " Four 
Georges," made familiar to readers by their pub- 
lication in the " Cornhill Magazine," and since 
then, in a separate form. The subject was not 
favourable to the display of the author's more 
genial qualities. Yery little that is good could 
be said of the Georges. Yet, where in English 
literature could we find anything more solemn 
and afiecting than his picture of the old King, 
the last of that name ? When " all light, all rea- 
son, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures 
of this world of God were taken from him." Con- 
cluding with the afiecting appeal to his American 
audience — " O brothers ! speaking the same dear 
mother tongue — O comrades ! enemies no more, 



144: Thackeray / the Humourist 

let us take a mournful hand together as we stand 
by this royal cor2)se, and call a truce to battle ! 
Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel 
once, and who was cast lower than the poorest — 
dead whom millions prayed for in vain. Hush, 
Strife and Quarrels over the solemn grave ! 
Sound Trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, Park 
Curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his 
awful tragedy ! " 

These lectures were successfully repeated in 
England. Mr. Thackeray, indeed, was now rec- 
ognized as one of the most attractive lecturers of 
the day. His appearance, whether in lecturing on 
the " Georges " for his own profit, or on " Week- 
day Preachers," or some other topic for the bene- 
fit of the families of deceased brother writers, such 
as the late Mr. Angus B. Reach and Mr. Douglas 
Jerrold, always attracted the most cultivated 
classes of the various cities in which he appeared; 
but an attempt to draw together a large audience 
of the less educated classes by giving a course of 
lectures at the great Music Hall, was less happy. 
In Edinburgh, his reception was always in the 
highest degree successful. He was more exten- 



and the Mem of Letters. 145 



sively known and admired among the intellectual 
portion of the people of Scotland than any living 
writer, not excepting Mr. Thomas Carlyle. There 
was something in his peculiar genius that com- 
mended him to the Northern temperament. About 
seven years before Thackeray was delivering his 
lectures on the " Four Georges " in Scotland, to 
larger and more intellectual audiences than ever 
listened to any other lecturer, and he lectured 
there since for the benefit of Mr. Angus B. 
Reach's widow. Nearly all the men of Edin- 
burgh, with any tincture of literature, had met 
him personally, and a few knew him well. He 
was almost the only great author that the major- 
ity of the lovers of literature in it had seen and 
heard, and his form and figure and voice, with 
its tragic tones and pauses, well entitled him to 
take his place in any ideal rank of giants. He 
was much gratified (says Mr. Hannay) by the suc- 
cess of the " Four Georges," — (a series which su- 
perseded an earlier scheme for as many discourses 
on ^'Men of the World,")— in Scotland. ^' I 
have had three per cent, of the whole population 
here ; " he wrote from Edinburgh in November, 

n 



146 Thackeray / the Humourist 

1856, — " If I could but get three per cent, out of 
London ! " 

Most of Mr. Thackeray's readers will remem- 
ber, that in 1857, he was invited by some friends 
to offer himself as a candidate for the representa- 
tion in Parliament of the City of Oxford. Mr. 
Hannay, in his graceful and affectionate memoir 
of Thackeray, published in the Edinburgh Gou- 
rant^ tells his readers, with a national zeal for his 
party, that the radicals hated Mr. Thackeray as 
the associate of aristocratic personages. But the 
radical party had no ground for such a feeling. 
From his earliest life he had professed strong lib- 
eral views ; and he maintained them to the last. 
An accident brought him into connexion with the 
scurrilous Tory writers who formed the staff of 
" Fraser," but his own papers in that magazine 
had nothing to do with politics ; and no hints 
will be found in them of sympathy with the po- 
litical views of his associates. In 1836, when 
writing for the Constitutional^ he wrote strongly 
in favour of advanced liberal views. In 185T, 
when a prosperous man, he contested the vacant 
borough of Oxford against the Government can- 



and the Man of Letters, 147 

didate, as an advocate of the Ballot — a fact which 
brought down upon him still more strongly the 
ready pens who write under Government inspira- 
tion in the Times. But the following papers 
from his Address- to the Electors of Oxford, will 
best show his views on politics at this time. 

" Gentlemen, — I should be unwortliy of tlie great 
kindness and cordiality witli which you have received 
me to-night, were I to hesitate to put your friendship to 
the test and ask you to confirm it at the poll. 

4c 4e 4c 4c ;{: 4: 

"I would use my best endeavours not merely to 
enlarge the constituencies, but to popularize the Gov- 
ernment of this country. With no feeling but that 
of good-will towards those leading aristocratic families, 
who are administering the chief offices of the State, I 
believe that it could be benefited by the skill and talents 
of persons less aristocratic, and that the country thinks so 
likewise. 

"I think that to secure the due freedom of repre- 
sentation, and to defend the poor voter from the chance 
of intimidation, the ballot is the best safeguard we 
know of, and would vote most hopefully for that mea- 
sure. I would have the sufirage amended in nature, 
as well as in numbers ; and hope to see many educated 
classes represented who have now no voice in elec- 
tions. 

•F •F T* *i* *F T* 

" The usefulness of a Member of Parliament is best 



148 Thackeray / the Humourist 



tested at home ; and should you think fit to elect me as 
your representative, I promise to use my utmost endeavour 
to increase and advance the social happiness, the knowl- 
edge, and the power of the people. 

" W. M. Thackeray. 
" Mitre, July 9, 1857." 

At the hustings he spoke as follows : — 

" As I came down to this place, I saw on each side 
of me placards announcing that there was no manner 
of doubt that on Tuesday the friends of the Eight Hon. 
Edward Cardwell would elect him to a seat in Parlia- 
ment. I also saw other placards announcing in similar 
terms a confidence that there was no doubt that I 
should be elected to a seat in Parliament for the City 
of Oxford. Now as both sides are perfectly confident 
of success — as I for my part, feel perfectly confident, 
and as my opponents entertain the same favourable 
opinion in regard to themselves — surely both sides may 
meet here in perfect good-humour. I hear that not 
long since — in the memory of many now alive — this 
independent city was patronized by a great university, 
and that a great duke, who lived not very far from 
here, at the time of election used to put on his boots 
and ride down and order the freemen of Oxford to 
elect a member for him. Any man who has wandered 
through your beautiful city as I have done within 
these last few days cannot but be struck with the dif- 
ference between the ancient splendour, the academic 
grandeur that prevailed in this place — the processions 
of dons, doctors, and proctors — and your new city, 



and the Man of Letters, 149 



wliich is not picturesque or beautiful at all, but which 
contains a number of streets, peopled by thousands 
of hard-working, honest, rough-handed men. These 
men have grown up of late years, and have asserted 
their determination to have a representative of their 
own. Such a representative they found three months 
ago, and such a representative they returned to Par- 
liament in the person of my friend, Mr. Neate.* But 
such a rei3resentative was turned out of that Parlia- 
ment by a sentence which I cannot call unjust, be- 
cause he himself is too magnanimous and generous 
to say so, but which I will call iniquitous. He was 
found guilty of a twopennyworth of bribery which he 
never committed ; and a Parliament which has swal- 
lowed so many camels, strained at that little gnat, and 
my friend, your representative, the very best man you 
could find to represent you was turned back, and you 
were left without a man. I cannot hope — I never 
thought to equal him ; I only came forward at a 
moment when I felt it necessary that some one pro- 
fessing his principles, and possessing your confidence, 
should be ready to step into the gap which he had 
made. I know that the place was very eagerly sought 
for by other folks on the other side, entertaining other 
opinions. Perhaps you don't know that last week there 
was a Tory baronet down here, walking about in the 
shade, as umbrageous almost as that under which 
my opponent, Mr. Cardwell, has sheltered himself. 

* Mr. Neate was then Professor of Political Economy in 
the University, 



160 ThacJceray / the Humourist 



Of course you know there came down a ministerial 
nominee — Lord Monck; but you do not know that 
Mr. Hayter, who is what is called the Whipper-in for 
the Ministerial party, came down here also on Saturday 
week in a dark and mysterious manner, and that some 
conversation took place, the nature of which I cannot 
pretend to know anything about, because I have no spies, 
however people may be lurking at the doors of our 
committee-room. But the result of all was, that Lord 
Monck disappeared, and Mr. Hayter vanished into 
darkness and became a myth ; and we were informed 
that a powerful requisition from the City of Oxford 
had invited Mr. Cardwell. Mind, Mr. Cardwell has 
given no note in reply — no mark, no sign. We do 
not know, even now, whether he accepted that polite 
invitation ; we do not know it even to this day, except 
that his godfathers have been here and have said so. 
After the manner in which the electors of Oxford have 
received me, could I possibly have gone back simply 
because we are told that Mr. Cardwell had received an 
invitation, which we did not know whether he had 
accejited or not ? I feel it, therefore, to be my humble 
duty to stand in the place where I found myself. I 
do not know that I would have ventured to oppose 
Mr. Cardwell under other circumstances. I am fully 
aware of hfe talents. I know his ability as a states- 
man, and no man can say that I have, during the whole 
of my canvass, uttered a word at all unfriendly or dis- 
respectful towards that gentleman. I should have 
hesitated on any other occasion in opposing him, but 
I cannot hesitate now, because I know that we have 



cmd the Man of Letters, 151 



the better cause, and that we mean to make that better 
cause triumphant. 

I say they have, and that any man who belongs to the 
Peelite party is not the man who ought to be put for- 
ward by any constituency at the eve of a great and 
momentous English war. As to my own opinions on 
public questions, you may have heard them pretty freely 
expressed on many occasions. I only hope if you elect 
me to Parliament, I shall be able to obviate the little 
difficulty which has been placarded against me — that 
I could not speak. I own I cannot speak very well, 
but I shall learn. I cannot spin out glibe sentences by 
the yard, as some people can ; but if I have got any- 
thing in my mind, if I feel strongly on any question, I 
have I believe got brains enough to express it. When 
you send a man to the House of Commons, you do not 
want him to be always talking; he goes there to con- 
duct the business of the coimtry; he has to prepare 
himself on the question on which he proposes to speak 
before six hundred and fifty-six members, who would 
be bored if every man were to deliver his opinion. He 
must feel and understand what he is going to say, and 
I have not the least doubt that I shall be able to say 
what I feel and think, if you will give me the chance 
of saying it. If any one in the House of Commons 
talked all he thought upon everything, good God ! what 
a Babel it would be ! You would not get on at all. 
On the first night I came among you, many questions 
were put to me by a friend, who capped them all by 
saying, 'Now, Mr. Thackeray, are you for the honour 



152 Thaclceray / the Humourist 

of England ? ' I said that that was rather a wild and 
a wide question to put, but to the best of my belief I 
was for the honour of England, and would work for it 
to the best of my power. About the ballot we are all 
agreed. If I was for the ballot before I came down 
here, I am more for the ballot now. As to triennial 
Parliaments, if the constituents desire them, I am for 
them." 

A voice here inquired if Mr. Thackeray " would 
have the ballot to-morrow ? " and he continued — 

" iN'o, we are too manly, too plucky, too honest, and 
we will beat them without it ; but another day, when 
we have a better representation, we will have the 
ballot. If you elect me, I shall not go to the House 
of Commons hostile to the present Ministry, but deter- 
mined to keep them to their work, and to prevent them 
from shrinking from any of the promises they have 
made. I think them in a war crisis eminently the best 
men to carry on the councils of the country, and to 
contend against the Tories and Peelites, who have very 
nearly paralyzed their arms." 

The official declaration showed that the popular 
novelist was beaten by so narrow a majority in a 
contest with an opponent backed by the powerful 
support of the Government, as to afford abunda.nt 
evidence of the favour of the electors. The result 
was declared on the 21st July, by the Mayor, at 



and the Man of Letters, 153 

six o'clock, and the yard attached to the Townhall 
was as fully crowded as it had been on the pre- 
vious morning. The announcement was received 
with a mixture of cheers and hisses ; but on Mr. 
Thackeray coming forward to addi'ess the meet- 
ing, he was welcomed with loud and prolonged 
cheering. He said — 

" Give me leave to speak a few words to you on this 
occasion, for although the red, white and blue are my 
friends, I hope to make the green and yellow my 
friends also. Let me tell you a little story, but a true 
one. Some years ago, when boxing was more common 
in this country than it is at the present time, two 
celebrated champions met to fight a battle on Moulsey 
Heath. Their names were Gully and Gregson. They 
fought the most tremendous battle that had been known 
for many long years, and Gregson got the worst of it. 
As he was lying on his bed some time afterwards, 
blinded and his eyes closed up, he asked a friend to 
give him something to drink. A person in the room 
hauded him some drink and grasped him by the hand. 
' Whose hand is this ? ' asked Gregson. ' 'Tis Jack 
Gully's,' was the reply. Now Gregson was the man 
who was beaten and Gully was the conqueror, and he 
was the first man to shake him by the hand, to show 
him that he had no animosity against him. This 
should be the conduct of all loyal Englishmen, to fight 
a good fight, and to hold no animosity against the 



164 Thackeray / the Humourist 



opposite side. With this feeling I go away from Oxford. 
With this feeling I shall have redeemed one of the 
promises I made you yesterday; the other I cannot 
by any possibility answer, because, somehow or other, 
our side has come out a little below the other side. I 
wish to shake Mr. Cardwell by the hand, and to con- 
gratulate him on being the representative of this great 
city. I say it is a victory you ought to be proud of ; 
it is a battle which you ought to be proud of who 
have taken part in it ; you have done your duty nobly 
and fought most gallantly. I am a man who was 
unknown to most of you, who only came before you 
with the recommendation of my noble and excellent 
friend Mr. Neate, but I have met with many Mends. 
You have fought the battle gallantly against great in- 
fluences, against an immense strength which have been 
brought against you, and in favour of that honoured 
and respected man Mr. Cardwell." 

Some hisses having greeted this remark, Mr. 
Thackeray exclaimed — 

" Stop, don't hiss. When Lord Monck came down 
here and addressed the electors, he was good enough 
to say a kind word in favour of me. Now, that being 
the case, don't let me be outdone in courtesy and 
generosity, but allow me to say a few words of the 
respect and cordiality which I entertain for Mr. Card- 
well. As for the party battle which divides you, I 
am, gentlemen, a stranger, for I never heard the name 
of certain tradesmen of this city till I came among you. 



and iJie Man of Letters. 155 



Perhaps I thought my name was better known than it 
is. You, the electors of Oxford, know whether I have 
acted honestly towards you \ and you on the other side 
will say whether I ever solicited a vote when I knew 
that vote was promised to my opponent ; or whether 
I have not always said — ' Sir, keep your word ; here is 
my hand on it, let us part good friends.' With my 
opponents I part so. With others, my friends, I part 
with feelings still more friendly, not only for the 
fidelity you have shown towards me, but for your noble 
attachment to the gallant and tried whom you did 
know, and who I hope will be your representative at some 
future time." 

In answer to a ciy of " Bribery," lie con- 
tinned — 

" Doff't cry out, bribery ; if you know of it, prove it ; 
but as I am innocent of bribery myself, I do not choose 
to fancy that other men are not equally loyal and 
honest. It matters very little whether I am in the 
House of Commons or not, to prate a little more ; but 
you have shown a great spirit, a great resolution, and 
great independence ; and I trust at some future day, 
when you know me better than you do now, you will 
be able to carry your cause to a more successful issue. 
Before I came to Oxford, I knew that there was a cer- 
tain question that would go against me, and which I 
would not blink to be made a duke or a marquis to- 
morrow. In March last, when I was at a dinner at 
Edinburgh, some friend of mine asked me to stand for 
the representation of their city. My answer was this 



156 Thackeray / the Humourist 

— ' That I was for having the people amused after they 
had done their worship on a Sunday.' I knew that I 
was speaking to a people who, of all others, were the 
most open to scruples on that point, but I did my duty 
as an honest man, and stated what my opinion was. 
I have done my duty honestly to this city, and I 
believe that this is the reason why I am placed in a 
minority ; but I am contented to bow to that decision. 
I told you that I was for allowing a man to have harm- 
less pleasures when he had done his worship on Sundays. 
I expected to have a hiss, but they have taken a more 
dangerous shape — the shape of slander. Those gentle- 
men who will take the trouble to read my books — and 
I should be glad to have as many of you for subscribers 
as will come forward — will be able to say whether there 
is anything in them that should not be read by any 
one's children, or by my own, or by any Christian man. 
I say, on this ground I will retire, aUd take my place 
with my pen and ink at my desk, and leave to Mr, Card- 
well a business which I am sure he understands better 
than I do." 

A characteristic anecdote lias recently been 
told in tlie newspapers relating to the Oxford 
election by one who was staying with Thackeray 
at his hotel during his contest wath Mr. Cardwell. 
"Whilst looking out a window a crowd passed 
along the street, hooting and handling rather 
roughly some of Mr. Cardwell's supporters. Mr. 



and the Man of Letters, 15Y 

Thackeray started up in tlie greatest possible ex- 
citement, and using some strong expletive, bolted 
down stairs, and notwithstanding the efforts of 
some old electioneers to detain him, who happened 
to be of opinion that a trifling correction of the 
opposite party might be beneficial^c>i^/' encourager 
les autresy he was not to be deterred, and was 
next seen towering above the crowd, dealing about 
him right and left, in defence of his opponent's 
partisans, and in defiance of his own friends. 

The year 1858 was marked by an unfortunate 
episode the facts of which cannot be omitted from 
this narrative, because though trifling in their 
origin, they finally led to a temporary estrange- 
ment between Mr. Thackeray and his great 
brother novelist, Mr. Dickens, with whom he had 
hitherto had only relations of the most friendly 
character. On the 12th of June in that year an 
article had appeared in a periodical called " Town 
Talk," which professed to give an account of 
Mr. Thackeray — his appearance, his career, and 
his success. The article was coarse and offensive 
in tone ; but it was notorious that the periodical 
was cdifed by a clever writer of the day, well- 



158 ThacJceray / the Humourist 

known to Mr. Thackeray, as a brother member 
of a dub to which he belonged. As such, the 
subject of the attack felt himself compelled to 
take notice of it. In order to understand the 
anger displayed by the latter at this unprovoked 
attack, it is necessary to quote the following pas- 
sage from the article : — 

"his appeakance. 

"Mr. Thackeray is forty-six years old, tliough from 
the silvery whiteness of his hair he appears somewhat 
older. He is very tall, standing upwards of six feet 
two inches ; and as he walks erect, his height makes 
Mm conspicuous in every assembly. His face is blood- 
less, and not particularly expressive, but remarkable for 
the fracture of the bridge of the nose, the result of an 
accident in youth. He wears a small grey whisker, 
but otherwise is clean shaven. No one meeting him 
could fail to recognize in him a gentleman : his bearing 
is cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either 
openly cynical or affectedly good-natured and benevo- 
lent ; his lonhommie is forced, his wit biting, his pride 
easily touched — but his appearance is invariably that 
of the cool, suave^ well-bred gentleman, who, whatever 
may be rankling within, suffers no surface display of his 
emotion. 

"nis SUCCESS, 

" Commencing with ' Vanity Fair,' culminated with 
his ' Lectures on the English Humourists of the 



amd the Man of Letters. 159 



Eighteenth Century,' which were attended by all the 
court and fashion of London. The prices were extrav- 
agant, the Lecturer's adulation of birth and position 
was extravagant, the success was extravagant. No one 
succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat 
according to his cloth : here he flattered the aristoc- 
racy, but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Wash- 
ington became the idol of his worship, the ' Four 
Georges ' the objects of his bitterest attacks. These 
last-named Lectures have been dead failures in Eng- 
land, though as literary compositions they are most 
excellent. Our own opinion is, that his success is on 
the wane ; his writings never were understood or ap- 
preciated even by the middle classes; the aristocracy 
have been alienated by his American onslaught on their 
body, and the educated and refined are not sufficiently 
numerous to constitute an audience ; moreover, there 
is a want of heart in all he writes, which is not to be 
balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm and the most 
perfect knowledge of the workings of the human 
heart." 

Two days later Mr. Thackeray addressed the 

assumed writer of this article, in the following 

letter : 

"36 Onslow-square, S. W., June 14. 

" Sir, — I have received two numbers of a little paper 
called * Town Talk,' containing notices respecting my- 
self, of which, as I learn from the best authority, you are 
the writer. 

"In the first article of ' Literary Talk' you think fit 



160 Thackeray / the Humowist 



to publish an incorrect account of ray private dealings 
with my publishers. 

" In this week's number appears a so-called ' Sketch,' 
containing a description of my manners, person, and 
conversation, and an account of my literary works, which 
of course you are at liberty to praise or condemn as a 
literary critic. 

" But you state, with regard to my conversation, that 
it is either ' frankly cynical or affectedly benevolent and 
good-natured ; ' and of my works (Lectures), that in some 
I showed ' an extravagant adulation of rank and position,' 
which in other lectures (' as I know how to cut my coat 
according to my cloth ') became the object of my bit- 
terest attack. 

" As I understand your phrases, you imj)ute insin- 
cerity to me when I speak good-naturedly in private ; 
assign dishonorable motives to me for sentiments 
which I have delivered in public, and charge me with 
advancing statements which I have never delivered 
at all. 

" Had your remarks been written by a person un- 
known to me, I should have noticed them no more than 
other calumnies ; but as we have shaken hands more than 
once, and met hitherto on friendly terms (you may ask 

one of your employers, Mr. , of , whether I did 

not speak of you very lately in the most friendly manner), 
I am obliged to take notice of articles which I consider 
to be not offensive and unfriendly merely, but slanderous 
and untrue. 

' We met at a Club, where, before you were born, 
I believe, I and other gentlemen have been in the habit 



and the Man of Letters. 161 

of talking without any idea that our conversation "would 

supply paragraphs for professional vendors of ' Literary 

Talk ; ' and I don't remember that out of that Club I 

have ever exchanged six words with you. Allow me to 

inform you that the talk which you have heard there 

is not intended for newspaper remarks ; and to beg — 

as I have a right to do — that you will refrain from 

printing comments upon my private conversations ; 

that you will forego discussions, however blundering, 

ujDon my private affairs ; and that you wiU henceforth 

please to consider any question of my personal truth 

and sincerity as quite out of the province of your 

criticism. I am, &c. 

" W. M. Thackeray." 

Subsequently Mr. Thackeray " rather (he said) 
than have any further correspondence with the 
writer of the character," determined to submit the 
letters which had passed between them to the 
Committee of the Club, for that body to decide 
whether the practice of publishing such articles 
would not be " fatal to the comfort of the Club," 
and " intolerable in a society of gentlemen." 
The Committee accordingly met, and decided that 
the writer of the attack complained of was bound 
to make an ample apology, or to retire from the 
Club. The latter contested the right of the 
Committee to interfere. Suifs at law and pro- 



162 Thackeray / the Humourist 

ceedings in Chancery against the committee, were 
threatened ; when Mr. Dickens, who was also a 
member of the Club, interfered with the following 
letter : — 

" Tavistock House, Tavistock-square, London, W. C. 
" Wednesday, 24th November, 1858. 

"My dear Thackeray, — Without a word of pre- 
lude, I wish this note to revert to a subject on wliich 
I said six words to you at tlie Athenaeum when I last 
saw you. 

" Coming home from my country work, I find Mr. 
Edwin James's opinion taken on this painful question 
of the Garrick and Mr. Edmund Yates. I find it strong 
on the illegality of the Garrick proceeding. Not to com- 
plicate this note or give it a formal appearance, I forbear 
from copying the opinion ; but I have asked to see it, and 
I have it, and I want to make no secret from you of a 
word of it. 

" I find Mr. Edwin James retained on the one side ; 
I hear and read of the Attorney-General being retained 
on the other. Let me, in this state of things, ask you a 
plain question. 

" Can any conference be held between me, as repre- 
senting Mr. Yates, and an appointed friend of yours, as 
representing you, with the hope and purpose of some quiet 
accommodation of this deplorable matter, which will 
satisfy the feelings of all concerned ? 

" It is right that, in putting this to you, I should 
tell you that Mr. Yates, when you first wrote to him, 



and the Man of Letters. 163 



bronght your letter to me. He had recently done me 

a manly service I can never forget, in some private 

distress of mine (generally within your knowledge), 

and he naturally thought of me as his friend in an 

emergency. T told him that his article was not to be 

defended ; but I confirmed him in his opinion that it 

was not reasonably possible for him set to right what 

was amiss, on the receipt of a letter couched in the 

very strong terms you had employed. When you 

appealed to the Garrick Committee, and they called 

their Greneral Meeting, I said at that meeting that you 

and I had been on good terms for many years, and 

that I was very sorry to find myself opposed to you ; 

but that I was clear that the Committee had nothing 

on earth to do with it, and that in the strength of my 

conviction I should go agamst them. 

" If this mediation that I have suggested can take 

place, I shall be heartily glad to do my best in it — and 

God knows in no hostile spirit towards any one, least of 

all to you. If it cannot take place, the thing is at least 

no worse than it was ; and you will burn this letter, and 

I will burn your answer. 

" Yours faithfully, 

" Charles Dickens. 
" W. M. Thackeray, Esq." 

To this Mr. Thackeray replied : — 

" 36, Onslow-square, 26th November, 1858. 
"Dear Dickens, — I grieve to gather from your 
letter that you were Mr. Yates's adviser in the dispute 
between me and him. His letter was the cause of my 



164 ThacJceray / the Humourist 



appeal to the Garrick Club for protection from insults 
against wliich I had no other remedy. 

"I placed my grievance before the Committee of 
the Club as the only place where I have been accus- 
tomed to meet Mr. Yates. They gave their opinion 
of his conduct and of the reparation which lay in his 
power. Not satisfied with their sentence, Mr. Yates 
called for a General Meeting ; and, the meeting which 
he had called having declared against him, he declines 
the jurisdiction which he had asked for, and says he 
will have recourse to lawyers. 

"You say that Mr. Edwin James is strongly of 
opinion that the conduct of the Club is illegal. On 
this point I can give no sort of judgment : nor can I 
conceive that the Club will be frightened, by the 
opinion of any lawyer, out of their own sense of the 
justice and honour which ought to obtain among 
gentlemen. 

"Ever since I submitted my case to the Club, I 

have had, and can have, no part in the dispute. It is 

for them to judge if any reconcilement is possible with 

your friend. I subjoin the copy of a letter which I 

wrote to the Committee, and refer you to them for the 

issue. 

" Yours, &c,, 

" W. M. Thackeray. 
" C. Dickens, Esq." 

The enclosure referred to was as follows : — 

" Onslow-square, Nov. 28, 1858. 
" Gentlemen, — I have this day received a commu- 



and the Man of Letters. 165 

nication from IMr. Charles Dickens, relative to tlie 
dispute "which has been so long pending, in which he 
says : — 

" * Can any conference be held between me as repre- 
senting Mr. Yates, and any aj^pointed friend of yours, 
as representing you, in the hope and purpose of some 
quiet accommodation of this deplorable matter, which 
will satisfy the feelings of all parties ? ' 

" I have written to Mr. Dickens to say, that since 
the commencement of this business, I have placed 
myself entirely in the hands of the Committee of the 
Garrick, and am still as ever prepared to abide by any 
decision at which they may arrive on the subject. I 
conceive I cannot, if I would, make the dispute once 
more personal, or remove it out of the court to which 
I submitted it for arbitration. 

" If you can devise any peaceful means for ending 
it, no one will be better pleased than 

" Your obliged faithful servant 

" W. M. Thackekat. 

" The Committee of the Garrick Club." 

It ■would be in vain to attempt to conceal that 
this painful affair left a coolness between Mr. 
Thackeray and his brother novelist. Mr. Thackeray, 
smarting under the elaborate and unjust attack, 
portions of which were copied and widely circu- 
lated in other jom'nals, could not but regard 
the friend and adviser of his critic as, in some 



166 ThacJceray ; the Humourist 

degree, associated with it ; and Mr. Dickens on 
the other hand, naturally hurt at finding his ofibr of 
arbitration rejected, gave the letters to the original 
author of the trouble for publication, with the 
remark — ^" As the receiver of my letter did not 
respect the confidence in which it addressed him, 
there can be none left for you to violate. I send 
you what I wrote to Mr. Thackeray, and what he 
wrote to me, and you are at perfect liberty to print 
the two." Thus, for a while, ended this painful 
affair. Readers of Disraeli's " Quarrels of Au- 
thors " will miss in it those sterner features of the 
dissensions between literary men as they were con- 
ducted in the old times ; but none can contem- 
plate this difference between the two great masters 
of fiction of our day with other than feelings of 
regret for the causes which led to it. 

It is pleasing, however, to learn that the dif- 
ferences between them were ended before Mr. 
Thackeray's death. Singularly enough, this happy 
circumstance occurred only a few days before the 
time when it would have been too late. The two 
great authors met by accident in the lobby of a 
Club. They suddenly turned and saw each other, 



amd the Man of Letters. 167 

and the unrestrained impulse of both was to hold 
out the hand of forgiveness and fellowship. "Witli 
that hearty grasp the difference which estranged 
them ceased for ever. This, says the narrator of 
this circumstance, must have been a great conso- 
lation to Mr. Dickens when he saw his great bro- 
ther laid in the earth at Kensal Green ; and no 
one who has read the beautiful and affecting article 
on Thackeray, from the hand of Mr. Dickens, just 
published in the " Cornhill Magazine," can doubt 
that all trace of this painful affair had vanished. 
We believe that the writer of the article which 
had created so much ill-will, when the angry feel- 
ings excited by these differences had passed away, 
was no less willing to admit that he had exceeded 
the limits of fair criticism, and, acting upon false 
impressions, had done an unintentional wrong. 



168 Thackeray / the Humourist 



CHAPTEE y. 

COMMENCEMENT OF THE " COKNHILL MAGAZINE" — UNSUC- 
CESSFUL ATTEMPT AS A DRAMATIC WRITER — THE WOLF 
AND THE LAMB — THE MOUNTAIN SYLPH — THE ADVEN- 
TURES OF PHILIP — THE LECTURES ON THE GEORGES — 
EDITORIAL TROUBLES — ANECDOTES OF HIS CORRES- 
PONDENTS — WITHDRAWAL FROM THE EDITORSHIP OF 
THE " CORNHILL " — BUILDING OF HIS HOUSE IN KEN- 
SINGTON PALACE GARDENS — MR. HANNAY's ANECDOTES 
— DEATH OF MR. THACKERAY — CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS 
illness — THE FUNERAL — HIS UNFINISHED WORK — MR. 

Thackeray's manuscripts — his early life at ottery 
st. mary — yerses on catholic emancipation meet- 
ing m. louis blanc's lectures — mr. robert bell- 
scene at lecture at oxford — ^various anecdotes — 
conclusion. 

The great event of the last few years of Mr. 
Thackeray's life was the starting of the " Cornhill 
Magazine," the first iN'umber of which, with the 
date of January, 1860, appeared shortly before 
Christinas in the previous year. The great success 
that Mr. Dickens had met with in conducting his 
weekly periodical, perhaps suggested to Messrs. 



(md the Mem of Letters. 169 

Smith, Elder, and .Co. tlie project of their new 
monthly magazine, with Mr. Thackeray for editor. 
But few expected a design so bold and original as 
they found developed by the appearance of Num- 
ber 1. The contents were by contributors of first- 
rate excellence ; the quantity of matter in each 
was equal to that given by the old-established 
magazines, published at half-a-crown, while the 
price of the " Cornhill," as every one knows, was 
only a shilling. The editor's ideas on the subject 
of the new periodical were explained by him some 
weeks before the commencement in a character- 
istic letter to his friend, Mr. G. H. Lewes, which 
was afterwards adopted as the vehicle of announc- 
ing the design to the public. 

" I am not mistaken," says this letter, " in supposing 
that my readers give me credit for experience and obser- 
vation, for having lived with educated people in many 
countries, and seen the world in no small variety ; and, 
having heard me soliloquize, with so much kindness and 
favour, and say my own say about life, and men and 
women, they will not be unwilling to try me as Con- 
ductor of a Concert, in which I trust many skilful per- 
formers will take part. We hope for a large number of 
readers, and must seek in the first place, to amuse and in- 
terest them. Fortunately for some folks, novels are as 
8 



170 Thackeray / the Humourist 

daily bread to others ; and fiction^f course must form a 
part, but only a part, of our entertainment. "We want, on 
the other hand, as much reality as possible — discussion 
and narrative of events interesting to the public, personal 
adventures and observation, familiar reports of scientific 
discovery, description of Social Institutions — quicguid 
agunt homines — a Great Eastern, a Battle in China, a 
Race-Course, a popular Preacher — there is hardly any 
subject we dori't want to hear about, from lettered and 
instructed men who are competent to speak on it." 

The first number contained the commencement 
of that series of " Boundabout Papers," in which 
we get so many interesting glimpses of Mr. 
Thackeray's personal history and feelings, and 
also the opening chapters of his story of " Lovel 
the Widower." The latter was originally written 
in the form of a comedy, entitled "• The Wolf 
and the Lamb," which was intended to be per- 
formed during the management of Mr. Wigan 
at the Olympic Theatre : but which was finally 
declined by the latter. Mr. Thackeray, we 
believe, acquiesced in the imfavourable judg- 
ment of the practical manager upon the acting 
qualities of his comedy ; and resolved to throw it 
into narrative form in the story with which his 
readers are now familiar. This was not the first 



and the Man of Letters, 171 

instance of his writing for the stage. If we are not 
mistaken, the libretto of Mr. John Barnett's popu- 
lar opera of the " Mountain Sylph," produced 
some thirty years since, was from his pen. In 
the " Cornhill " also, appeared his story of " Philip 
on his way through the World." The scenes in 
this are said to have been founded in great part 
upon his own experiences ; and there can be no 
doubt that the adventures of Philip Firmin repre- 
sent, in many respects, those of the Charterhouse 
boy, who afterwards became known to the 
world as the author of " Yanity Fair." But in 
all such matters it is to be remembered that the 
writer of fiction feels himself at liberty to deviate 
from the facts of his life in any way which he 
finds necessary for the development of his story. 
Certainly the odious stepfather of Philip must 
not be taken for Mr. Thackeray's portrait of his 
own stepfather, towards whom he always enter- 
tained feelings of respect and afi'ection. "We may 
also remind our readers that the " Lectures on 
the Four Georges," first appeared in print in this 
popular periodical. The sales reached by the 
earlier numbers were enormous, and far beyond 



172 Thackeray / the Humourist 

any tiling ever attained by a monthly magazine ; 
even after the usual subsidence wHcli follows the 
flush of a great success, the circulation had, we 
believe, settled at a point far exceeding the most 
sanguine hopes of the projectors. 

These fortunate results of the undertaking 
were, however, not without serious drawbacks. 
The editor soon discovered that his new position 
was, in many respects, an unenviable one. Friends 
and acquaintances, not to speak of constant 
readers and " regular subscribers to your inter- 
esting magazine," sent him bushels of manu- 
scripts, of which it was rare indeed to find one 
that could be accepted. Sensitive poets and 
poetesses took umbrage at refusals however kindly 
and delicately expressed. " How can I go into 
society with comfort ? " asked the editor of a 
friend at this time. " I dined the other day at 

's, and at the table were four gentlemen, 

whose masterpieces of literary art I had been 
compelled to decline with thanks." Not six 
months elapsed before he began to complain 
of " thorns " in the editorial cushion. One lady 
wrote to entreat that her article might be in- 



and the Man of Letters. 173 

serted on tlie ground that she had known better 
days, and had a sick and widowed mother to 
maintain — others began with fine phrases about 
the merits and eminent genius of the person they 
were addressing. Some found fault with articles, 
and abused contributor and editor. An Irish- 
man threatened punishment for an implied libel 
in " Lovel the "Widower," upon ballet-dancers, 
whom he declared to be superior to the snarlings 
of dyspeptic libellers, or the spiteful attacks and 
hrutum fulmen of ephemeral authors. This gen- 
tleman also informed the editor that theatrical 
managers were in the habit of speaking good 
English — possibly better than ephemeral authors. 
" Out of mere malignity," exclaims the unfortu- 
nate editor, " I suppose there is no man who 
would like to make enemies. But here, in this 
editorial business you can't do otherwise ; and a 
queer, strange, bitter thought it is that must 
cross the mind of many a public man. ' Do what 
I will, be innocent or spiteful, be generous or 
cruel, there are A. and B. and C. and D. who 
will hate me to the end of the chapter — to the 
chapter's end — to the finis of the page — whei> 



174 Thackeray / the Humourist 

hate and envy, and fortune and disappointment 
shall be over.' " * 

It was chiefly owing to these causes that Mr. 
Thackeray finally determined to .withdraw from 
the editorship of the Magazine ; though continuing 
to contribute to it, and to take an interest in its 
progress. In an amusing address to contributors 
and correspondents, dated 18th March, 1862, he 
announces this determination. " I belieye," he 
says, " my own special readers will agree that my 
books will not suffer when their author is re- 
leased from the daily task of reading, accepting, 
refusing, losing and finding the works of other 
people. To say ' ITo,' has often caused me a 
morning's peace, and a day's work. Oh, those 
hours of madness, spent iil searching for Louisa's 
lost lines to her dead ' Piping Bullfinch,' or ' IThoj 
Senoj's'f mislaid Essay. I tell them for the last 
time that the (late) Editor will not be responsible 
for rejected communications, and herewith send 
off the chair and the great " Cornhill Magazine " 

* " Roundabout Papers," No. 5. 

t The reader will discover the meaning of this by re- 
versing the letters of Nhoj Senoj's name. 



and the Man of Lettors. 175 

tin box with its load of care." In the same 
address he announced that while the tale of 
" Philip " had been passing through the press, he 
had been preparing another, on which he had 
worked at intervals for many years past, and 
which he hoped to introduce in the following year. 
In a pecuniary sense, the " Cornhill .Mag- 
azine " had undoubtedly proved a fortunate 
venture for its editor. It was during his editor- 
ship that he removed from his house, No. 36, 
Onslow-square, in which he had resided for some 
years, to the more congenial neighbourhood of 
the Palace at Kensington, that " Old Court 
Suburb," which Mr. Leigh Hunt has gossipped 
about so pleasantly. Mr. Thackeray took upon 
a long lease, a somewhat dilapidated mansion on 
the west side of Kensington Palace-gardens. His 
intention was to repair and improve it, but he 
finally resolved to pull it down, and build another 
in its stead. The new house, a handsome, solid 
mansion of choice red brick with stone facings, 
was built from a design drawn by himself ; and 
in this house he continued to reside till the time 
of his death. " It was," says Mr. Hannay, " a 



176 Thackeray / the Humov/rist 

dwelling worthy of one who really represented 
literature in tlie great world, and who planting 
liimself on his books, yet sustained the character 
of his profession with all the dignity of a gentle- 
man. A friend who called on him there from 
Edinburgh, in the simimer of 1862, knowing of 
old his love of the Yenusian, playfully reminded 
him what Horace says of those who, regardless of 
their sepulchre, employ themselves in building 
houses : — 

" Sepulchri 
Immemor struis domos." 

" l^ay," said he, " I am memor sejmlchri, for 
this house will always let for so many hundreds 
(mentioning the sum) a year." "We may add, that 
Mr. Thackeray was always of opinion, that not- 
withstanding the somewhat costly proceeding of 
pulling down and re-erecting, he had achieved the 
rare result for a private gentleman, of building for 
himself a house which, regarded as an investment 
of a portion of his fortune, left no cause for regret. 

Our brief narrative draws to a close. The 
announcement of the death of Mr. Thackeray, 
coming so suddenly upon us in the very 



and the Man of Letters. 177 

midst of our great Christian festival of 1863, cre- 
ated a sensation which will be long remembered. 
His hand had been missed in the last two num- 
bers of the " Comhill Magazine," but only be- 
cause he had been busily engaged in laying the 
foundations of another of those continuous works 
of fiction which his readers so eagerly expected. 
In the then current I^umber of the " Cornhill 
Magazine," the customary orange-coloured fly- 
leaf had announced that ^ a new serial story ' by 
him would be commenced early in the new year ; 
but the promise had scarcely gone abroad when 
we learnt that the hand which had penned its 
opening chapters, in the fall prospect of a happy 
ending, could never again add line or word to 
that long range of writings which must always 
remain one of the best evidences of the strength 
and beauty of our English speech. 

On the Tuesday preceding he had followed to 
the grave his relative, Lady Rodd, widow of Yice- 
Admiral Sir John Tremayne Eodd, K.C.B., who 
was the daughter of Major James Rennell, F.R.S., 
Surveyor-General of Bengal, by the daughter of 
the Rev. Dr. Thackeray, Head Master of Harrow 



178 Thackeray 'j the Humourist 

School. Only the day before this, according to a 
newspaper account, he had been congratulating 
himself on having finished four numbers of a new 
novel ; he had the manuscript in his pocket, and 
with a boyish frankness showed the last pages to 
a friend, asking him to read them, and see what 
he could make of them. When he had completed 
four numbers more he said he would subject him- 
self to the skill of a very clever surgeon, and be 
no more an invalid. Only two days before he had 
been seen at his club in high spirits ; but with all 
liis high spirits, he did not seem well ; he com- 
plained of illness ; but he was often ill, and he 
laughed off his present attack. He said that he 
was about to undergo some treatment which would 
work a perfect cure in his system, and so he made 
light of his malady. He was suffering from two 
distinct complaints, one of which has now wrought 
his death. More than a dozen years before, while 
he was writing " Pendennis," the publication of 
that work was stopped by his serious illness. He 
was brought to death's door, and he was saved 
from death by Dr. Elliotson, to whom, in gratitude, 
he dedicated the novel when he lived to finish it. 



and the Man of Letters. 179 

But ever since that ailment he had been subject 
every month or six weeks to attacks of sickness, 
attended with violent retching. He was con- 
gratulating himself, just before his death, on 
the failure of his old enemy to return, and 
then he checked himself, as if he ought not 
to be too sure of a release from his plague. 
On the morning of Wednesday, the 23rd of 
December, the complaint returned, and he was 
in great suffering all day."^ He was no better 
in the evening, and his valet, Charles Sargent, 
left him at eleven o'clock on Wednesday night, 
Mr. Thackeray wishing him '' Good night " as he 
went out of the room. At nine o'clock on the 
following morning the valet entering his master's 
chamber as usual, he found him lying on his 
back quite still, with his arms spread over the 
coverlet, but he took no notice, as he also was 
accustomed to see his master thus after one of 
his stomach attacks. He brought some coffee 
and set it down beside the bed, and it was only 
when he returned after an interval and found 
that the cup had not been tasted, that a sudden 

* Times Newspaper, 25tli Dec, 1863. 



180 Thackeray / the Humourist 

alarm seized him, and he discovered that his 
master was dead. About midnight Mr. Thack- 
eray's mother, who slept overhead, had heard him 
get up and walk about his room; but she was 
not alarmed, as this was a habit of her son when 
unwell. It is supposed that he had, in fact, been 
seized at this time, and that the violence of the 
attack had brought on the effusion on the brain, 
which, as the post-mortem examination showed, 
was the immediate cause of death. His medical 
attendants attributed his death to effusion on the 
brain. They added that he had a very large 
brain, weighing no less than 58Joz. He thus 
died of the complaint which seemed to trouble 
him least. 

The shock occasioned by the news of his 
death cannot be better described than in the 
words of one whose generous testimony is the 
more interesting from the fact of its author hav- 
ing been the acknowledged writer of the unjust 
and inconsiderate sketch of Mr. Thackeray's life 
and character, which had led to the unhappy dis- 
sensions in the Garrick Club. 

"On Christmas-Eve," says Mr. Edmund Yates, the 



and the Man of Letters. 181 



writer referred to, "in the twiliglit, at the time when 
the clubs are filled with men who have dropped in on 
their homeward way to hear the latest news, or to 
exchange pleasant jests or seasonable greetings, a 
rumour ran through London that Thackeray was dead. 
I myself heard it on club steps from the friend who had 
just returned from telegraphing the intelligence to an 
Irish newspaper, and at first doubted, as all did, the 
authenticity of the information. One had seen him 
two days before, another had dined in his company but 
two nights previously; but it was true! Thackeray 
was dead; and the purest English prose writer of the 
nineteenth century, and the novelist with a greater 
knowledge of the human heart as it really is than any 
one — ^with the exception, perhaps, of Shakspeare and 
Balzac — was suddenly struck down in the midst of us. 
In the midst of us! Ko long illness, no lingering 
decay, no gradual suspension of power; almost pen in 
hand, like Kempenfelt, he went down. "Well said the 
Examiner — * Whatever little feuds may have gathered 
about Mr. Thackeray's public life lay lightly on the 
surface of the minds that chanced to be in contest 
with him. They could be thrown off in a moment, 
at the first shock of the news that he was dead.' It 
seemed impossible to realize the fact. No other celeb- 
rity, be he writer, statesman, artist, actor, seemed so 
thoroughly a portion of London. That 'good grey 
head which all men knew' was as easy of recognition 
as his to whom the term applied, the Duke of Wel- 
lington. Scarcely a day passed without his being seen 
in the Pall-Mail districts; and a Londoner showing 



182 Thackeray / the Hmnourist 

country cousins tlie wonders of the metropolis, gen- 
erally knew how to arrange for them to have a sight of 
the great English writer. The Examiner was right, 
God knows ! the shock had thrown off all but regretful 
feelings, and an impossibility to comprehend the mag- 
nitude of the sudden loss. We talked of him — of how, 
more than any other author, he had written about what 
is said of men immediately after their death — of how 
he had written of the death-chamber, ' They shall come 
in here for the last time to you, my friend in motley.' 
We read that marvellous sermon which the week-day 
preacher delivered to entranced thousands over old 
John Sedley's dead body, and ' sadly fell our Christmas- 
Eve.' One would have thought that the Times could 
have spared more space than a bare three-quarters of a 
column for the record of such a man's life and death. 
One would have thought that Westminster Abbey 
might have opened her doors for the reception of the 
earthly remains of one whose name will echo to the end 
of time. And, as I write, the thought occurs to me 
that the same man was, perhaps, the last to wish for 
either of such distinctions." 

The funeral took place on the 30th of Decem- 
ber, the body being interred in Kensal Green 
cemetery. The day was beautiful, and the atmo- 
sphere as balmy as if it were June instead of 
December. On the way to the cemetery there 
could be seen not only the carriages of the aristo- 



and the Man of Letters, 183 

cratic and wealthy, but also many persons of the 
humbler class ; and, indeed, there was much 
evidence at the grave that the English people — 
and not any particular class — felt their bereave- 
ment in the gifted and genial author. It was 
remarkable also what various departments of life 
and thought were represented — the actor and the 
artist, the editor and the novelist, the poet and 
the clergyman, all were there to mourn over one 
whose mind and heart were a hundred-gated city. 
Amongst the 1500 persons present were noticed 
Mr. Robert Browning, Mr. Charles Dickens, Mr. 
Anthony Trollope, Mr. Mark Lemon, Mr. G. H. 
Lewes, Mr. Theodore Martin, Mr. Isaac Butt, 
M.P., Mr. W. H. Eussell, LL.D., Mr. Laurence, 
barrister ; Mr. J. 0. O'Dowd, barrister ; Mr. 
Higgins (elacob Omnium), Mr. Robert Bell, Mr. 
Howell Morgan, the High Sheriff of Merioneth- 
shire ; Rev. Dr. Rudge, the Archdeacon of Lon- 
don, Master of the Charterhouse, in which Mr. 
Thackeray was educated ; Mr. Millais, R. A. ; Mr. 
George Cruikshank, an old friend of Mr. Thack- 
eray, with whom in his early life the author 
studied etching ; Mr. Leech, Mr. Shirley Brooks, 



184 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Mr. Creswell, Mr. H. Cole, C.B., Mr. C. L. 
Gruneisen, Mr. Charles Matliews, Mr. Tom Tay- 
lor, Sir J. Carmichael, Mr. J. Hollingshead, Mr. 
DaUas, Mr. 0':N'eile, Mr. Creswick, K.A. ; M. 
Louis Blanc, Mr. Walker, Mr. E. Piggott, Mr. M. 
D. Conwaj, Mr. G. J. Holyoake, and Miss Brad- 
don. Mr. Carljle, between whom and Mr. Thack- 
eray a friendship of many years subsisted, was 
prevented from attending by illness in his family. 
The funeral procession, which, in accordance 
with the well-known tastes of the deceased, was 
remarkably simple, arrived at the cemetery about 
twelve o'clock. There was but one mourning 
coach, in w^hich were seated Mr. F. St. John 
Thackeray and Mr. James Eodd, cousins of the 
deceased. In the succeeding carriage, the private 
carriage of Mr. Thackeray, were Captain Shaw,' 
his brother-in-law, and the Hon. E. Curzon. 
The remaining coaches were those of Earl Gran- 
ville, Mr. Martin Thackeray, General Low, Lord 
Gardiner, Sir W. Eraser, Hon. E. Curzon, Mr. 
Macaulay, Q.C., Sir James Colville, and Mr. 
Bradbury, of the eminent publishing firm of 
Bradbury and Evans. 



and the Man of Letters. 185 

The funeral service was read by the chaplain 
of the cemeterj, Eev. Charles Stuart. 

The Misses Thackeray were present in the 
chapel, and also looked into the grave. A deep 
sympathy was felt by all in their profound grief 
at the loss of one whose tenderness as a man was 
not less than his strength as an author. 

The coffin was quite plain and bore the in- 
scription ; — 

"WILLIAM MA:KEPEACE THACKERAY, ESQ , 

DIED 24th DECEMBER, 1863, 

AGED 53 TEARS. 

The scene was altogether deeply impressive. 
Many eyes were fastened upon Mr. Dickens, as 
he stood, side by side with Mr. Browning, look- 
ing into the grave of one whose greatness none 
could or did more appreciate. But there were 
many unknown to fame, and whose ties to the 
deceased were known only to their own hearts, 
who pressed their way to gaze with evident sor- 
row on the coffin. And after the solemn words, 
" dust to dust " had fallen on the sad hearts there 
gathered, and the ceremonies were over, the 
company seemed loth to depart, and lingered 



186 Thackeray / the Humourist 

ill quiet and Imslied conversation around the 
grave. 

Just before his death, as has been ah-eady 
stated, he had rejoiced over the completion of 
the fourth monthly portion of his story, seeing in 
it the promise of a work which would not be 
found, when completed, to fall short even of his 
fame. It was, like the Yirginians, a story of 
the times of George the First and George the 
Second. Some months previously it was ru- 
moured that the next work from his pen would 
relate to an early period of English history — a 
statement which a bold guesser subsequently en- 
larged into the assertion that its scene would be 
laid in the times of the Anglo-Saxons. Its 
author was doubtless amused at the paragraphs 
which made the customary tour through the press 
of London and the provinces, gravely informing 
the world that the author of " Esmond," and the 
" Essays on the Humourists," who had hitherto 
delighted in the times of elaborate flowing wigs, 
and swords, and coats with huge lapels, had sud- 
denly betaken himself to those misty days of 
savage manners and scanty clothing. The ru- 



cmd the Mmi of Letters, 187 

mour, in its im embellished form ^vas, however, 
not without foundation. He had recently con- 
templated writing a story of the days of Henry 
the Fifth, in which period of onr history some 
accidental bent of his reading had led him to take 
a special interest. He had even thought of some 
of its details, and had amused himself in imagi- 
nation with a grotesque scene in one of the old 
chroniclers of a famous royal lady, who rode into 
a fair city of J^ormandy upon a cow. But the 
notion was laid aside. His old passion for re- 
creating the life and manners of the last century 
was too powerful to be resisted, and he finally 
found himself at home in a story of English life 
of the old period, in which the elaborate imitation 
of the style of the Augustan age would not be 
allowed, as in the "Adventures of Henry Esmond," 
to interfere with the development of a story of a 
good and heroic stamp, in the presence of which 
the old complaints from adverse critics of cynicism 
and coldness should be heard no more. 



188 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Some few defeclied anecdotes may here be added. 
Mr. Thackeray was remarkable among his fellow 
literary men no less for the clearness of his hand- 
writing than for the general neatness of his manu- 
scripts. Page after page of that small round hand 
would be written by him absolutely — for he rare- 
ly altered his first draughts in any way — without 
interlineation, blot, or blemish of any kind. Only 
a few weeks before he died he spent a morning in 
the reading-room of the British Museum, and there 
by accident left upon a table a page of the manu- 
script of his unpublished story. The paper being 
found by the attendant, so well was this fact known, 
that the extreme clearness of the writing at once 
suggested its owner. An appeal to one of the 
officials who was familiar with his autographs de- 
cided the matter, and Mr. Thackeray, to his great 
surprise and gratification, was interrupted in his 
fruitless search at home by the arrival of a letter 
enclosing the missing page. 

It having been stated in an Exeter paper that 
Mr. Thackeray, when a boy, went to school at 
Ottery St. Mary, in that county, the Rev. Dr. 



and the Man of Letters, 189 

Cornish, the vicar of that place, has recently 
written to contradict it. It appears from the 
Doctor's letter that the step-father of the great 
novelist rented an estate near Ottery St. Mary, 
and that the latter, while stopping there, used to 
visit at the vicarage and borrow books of Dr. 
Cornish. The scenery of Clavering St. Mary and 
Chatteris, in " Pendennis," corresponds, according 
to the latter, in minute particulars with that of 
Ottery St. Mary and Exeter. One of the little 
marginal vignettes in that famous novel is a pic- 
ture of the clock tower of Ottery church. Thack- 
eray describes the youthful Pendennis as galloping 
through " the Iliad and Odyssey, the tragic play- 
writers, and the charming wicked Aristophanes, 
whom he vowed to be the greatest poet of all." 
When the author was about the age of his young 
hero, he borrowed of Dr. Cornish Carey's trans- 
lation of " The Birds of Aristophanes," which he 
read, says the Doctor, with intense delight, and 
returned it with three humorous illustrative draw- 
ings. Mr. Thackeray says in ''Pendennis" — 
" It was at this period of his existence that Pen 
broke out in the poet's corner of the county 



190 Thackeray / the Ilumom'ist 

Chronicle with some verses witli wMch he was 
perfectly well satisfied." Dr. Cornisli adds that 
when the great Catholic emancipation meeting 
took place on Penenden Heath, Thackeray brought 
him some verses, which were afterwards forwarded 
to an Exeter paper for insertion, and duly ap- 
peared. These verses, the Doctor thinks, were 
the first composition of the gi:eat humourist that 
were ever published : — 

IKISH MELODY. 

Air — " TJie Minstrel Boy.'''' 
Mister Shiel into Kent has gone, 

On Penenden Heath you'll find him ; 
Nor think you that he came alone, 

There's Doctor Doyle behind him. 
" Men of Kent," said this little man, 

" If you hate Emancipation, 
You're a set of fools : " he then began 
A " cut and dry " oration. 

He strove to speak, but the men of Kent, 

Began a grievous shouting. 
When out of his waggon the little man went, 

And put a stop to his spouting. 
" What though these heretics heard me not," 

Quoth he to his friend Canonical ; 
" My speech is safe in the Times I wot. 

And eke in the Morning Chronicle.'''' 



and the Man of Letters, 191 

Louis Blanc, the historian of the French Eevo- 
lution, has recently related in a French newspaper 
the following story :— ''A few years ago the London 
papers announced that a Frenchman whose name 
I need not give you [JM. Louis Blanc], was gomg 
to deliver in English what is here called a lecture. 
Foremost among those who were moved by a feel- 
ing of a delicate kindness and hospitable curiosity 
to encourage the lecturer with their presence was 
Thackeray. When the lecture was over, the 
manager of the literary institution where it was 
delivered, for some reason or other, recommended 
the company to take care of their pockets in the 
crowd at the doors — a hint which was not parti- 
cularly to the taste of a highly respectable and 
even distinguished audience. Some even protested, 
and none more warmly than an unknown person, 
very well dressed, sitting next to Mr. Robert Bell. 
]^ot content with speaking, this unknown person 
gesticulated in a singularly animated manner. 
^ Isn't such a suggestion indecent, sir, insulting \ ' 
said he to Mr. Bell. ' What does he take us for ? ' 
&c., &c. After giving vent to his indignation in 
this way for some moments, the susceptible 



192 Thackeray / the Humourist, 

stranger disappeared, and wlien Mr. Robert Bell, 
who wanted to know how long the lecture had 
lasted, put his hand to his watch-pocket, behold ! 
his watch had disappeared likewise. Thackeray, 
to whom his excellent friend mentioned the mis- 
hap, invited Kobert Bell to dinner a day or two 
after. "When the day came, Robert Bell took his 
seat at his friend's table, round which a joyous 
company of wits were gathered, and soon found 
himself encircled by a rattling fire of banter about 
an article of his which had just appeared in the 
' Cornhill Magazine,' then conducted by Thack- 
eray ; an article remarkable in all respects, and 
which had attracted universal notice, as a faithful, 
serious, and philosophical account of some effects 
of Spiritism which the author had witnessed at a 
seance given by Mr. Home. Mr. Robert Bell is 
an admirable causeur / his talk is a happy mixture 
of an Englishman's good sense and an Irishman's 
verve. So his questioners found their match in 
brilliant fence. !Next day a mysterious messenger 
arrived at Mr. Robert Bell's, and handed to him, 
without saying who had sent it, a box containing 
a note, worded, as nearly as I recollect, as follows : 



Anecdotes and Reminiscences. 193 

— ^ The Spirits present their compliments to Mr. 
Robert Bell, and as a mark of their gratitude to 
him, they have the honour to return him the 
watch that was stolen from him.' And a watch 
it really was that the box contained, but a watch 
far finer and richer than the one which had disap- 
peared. Mr. Robert Bell at once thought of 
Thackeray, and wrote to him without further ex- 
planation : — * I don't know if it is you, but it is 
very like you.' Thackeray in reply sent a carica- 
ture portrait of himself, drawn by his own hand, 
and representing a winged spirit in a flowing robe, 
and spectacles on nose. Thackeray had in early 
life taken to painting, and perhaps if he had pur- 
sued his first vocation, he might have come in 
time to handle the brush as well as he afterwards 
handled the pen. At any rate the drawing in 
question, as I can bear witness, was one to bring 
tears into your eyes for laughing. It was accom- 
panied by a note as follows : — ' The Spirit Gabriel 
presents his compliments to Mr. Robert Bell, and 
takes the liberty to communicate to him the por- 
trait of the person who stole the watch.' IN'ow, 
is not this bit of a story charming ? What grace ! 



194 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

what delicacy ! what humour in this inspiration 
of a friend who, to punish his friend for having 
done the Spirits the honour to speak of them, 
sends him with a smile a magnificent present. 
Honourable to Thackeray, this anecdote is equally 
so to Robert Bell, who could inspire such feelings 
in such a man. And this is why I feel a double 
pleasure in relating it." 

k N anonymous writer says : — " The first time I 
heard Mr. Thackeray read in public, he paid 
a tribute to ' Boz.' It was the night after the Ox- 
ford election, in which Mr. Thackeray was an un- 
successful candidate, and the kind-heai'ted author 
hastened up to town to fulfil a promise to give 
some readings on^ behalf of Mr. Angus Heach.* I 
well remember the burst of laughter and applause 
which greeted the opening words of his reading. 
' Walking yesterday down the streets of an ancient 
and well-known city, I,' — but here the allusion to 
Oxford was recognized, and he had to' wait until 



* The writer is here in error. The Lecture was not de- 
livered on behalf of Mr. Reach, but for the fund then 
being raised to the memory of the late Douglas Jerrold. 



Anecdotes and JReminiscences. 195 

the merriment it created had ceased. In alluding 
to Charles Dickens, Mr. Thackeray, after speaking 
with abhorrence of the impurity of the writings of 
Sterne, went on to say : — ' The foul satyr's eyes 
leer out of the leaves constantly ; the last words 
the famous author wrote were bad and wicked — 
the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned 
were for pity and pardon. I think of these past 
writers, and of one who lives amongst us now, and 
am grateful for the innocent laughter and the 
sweet and unsullied pages which the author of 
' David Copperfield ' gives to my children.' The 
author of ' David Copperfield ' was taken by sur- 
prise, and looked immensely hard at the ceiling, 
as if trying to persuade himself that he was un- 
known to the audience. On the same nio^ht I 
heard Thackeray read Hood's celebrated lines, 
' One more unfortunate,' &c." 

npHE same writer observes : — " Thackeray was a 
member of the Eeform, the Athena3um, and 
the Garrick Clubs — perhaps of others, but it was 
in those I have named that his leisure was usu- 
ally spent. The afternoons of the last week of his 



196 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

life were almost entirely passed at the Reform 
Club, and never had lie been more genial or in 
such apparently happy moods. Many men sitting 
in the libraries and the dining rooms of these 
Clubs, have thought this week of one of the ten- 
derest passages in his early sketches — ' Brown 
the younger at a Club,' — in which the old uncle 
is represented as telling his nephew, while show- 
ing him the various rooms of the club, of those 
who had dropped off — whose names had appeared 
at the end of the Club list, under the dismal 
category of ' members deceased,' in which (added 
Thackeray) ' You and I shall rank some day.' " 

IITR, HANI^AY says " his frankness and lon- 
hommie made him delightful in a tete-d-tete, 
and gave a pleasant human flavour to talk full of 
sense, and wisdom, and experience, and lighted up 
by the gaiety of the true London man of the world. 
Though he said witty things, now and then, he 
was not a wit in the sense in which Jerrold was, 
and he complained, sometimes, that his best 
things occurred to him after the occasion had 
gone by ! lie shone most — as in his books — 



Anecdotes and Reminiscences. 197 

in little subtle remarks on life, and little descrip- 
tive sketches suggested by the talk. "We re- 
member, in particular, one evening, after a din- 
ner-party at his house, a fancy picture he drew 
of Shakspeare during his last years at Stratford, 
sitting out in the summer afternoon watching the 
people, which all who heard it, brief as it was, 
thought equal to the best things in his Lectures. 
But it was not for this sort of talent, — rarely 
exerted by him, — that people admired his con- 
versation. They admired, above all, the broad 
sagacity, sharp insight, large and tolerant libe- 
rality, which marked him as one who was a sage 
as well as a story-teller, and whose stories were 
valuable because he was a sage. Another 
point of likeness to him in Scott was that 
he never over-valued story-telling, or forgot that 
there were nobler things in literature than the 
purest creation of which the object was amuse- 
ment." * 

* Mr. Hannay's interesting sketch, originally published 
in the form of an article in the Edinhurgh Courant, has 
since been reprinted in a pamphlet form by Messrs. Oliver 
and Boyd, of Edinburgh. 



198 ThacJceray / the Humourist, 

J^IIACKERAY and FIELDING.— Tii2.ii\Q- 
ray, many years since, came down into Somer- 
setshire to visit some friends in the bright and snn- 
ny days of Sydney Smith, and rejoiced in the so- 
ciety and cordial hospitality of the witty Rector of 
Combe Florey. Unfortunately, there is no Boswell 
to record the good things uttered by these noble 
humourists. Thackeray, at a later period of his 
life, contemplated a pilgrimage to Shai'pham Park, 
near Glastonbury, the birth-place of Fielding, 
whose character he has drawn with such genuine 
sympathy and discernment in his " Lectures on 
the English Humourists." He was gratified to 
learn from a gentleman living in that part of the 
country, Mr. Eanglake, that a place in the Gallery 
of " West Country " Worthies, with the glorious 
company of Blake and Locke, was reserved for 
the author of "Tom Jones." The inscription 
for the Fielding Memorial w^ould have been the 
work of Mr. Thackeray's hand if his life had been 
spared a few months longer. He was fond of 
repeating Gibbons' panegyric on Fielding. It is 
as follows : — " Our immortal Fielding was of the 
younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who 



Anecdotes and Reminiscences. 199 

drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. 
The successors of Charles Y. may disdain their 
brethren of England, but the romance of ' Tom 
Jones,' that exquisite picture of human manners, 
will outlive the Palace of the Escurial, and the 
Imperial Eagle of Austria." 

"TN" October, 1855, a dinner was given to Mr. 
-^ Thackeray at the London Tavern, of which 
one who was present gave at the time the follow- 
ing account : — " The Thackeray dinner was a 
triumph. Covers, we are assured, were laid for 
sixty ; and sixty and no more sat down precisely 
at the minute named to do honor to the great 
novelist. Sixty very hearty shakes of the hand 
did Thackeray receive from sixty friends on that 
occasion ; and hearty cheers from sixty vociferous 
and friendly tongues followed the chairman's, Mr. 
Charles Dickens, proposal of his health, and of 
wishes for his speedy and successful return among 
us. Dickens — the best after-dinner speaker now 
alive — was never happier. He spoke as if he was 
fully conscious that it was a great occasion, and 
that the absence of even one reporter was a matter 



200 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

of congratulation, affording ampler room to un- 
bend. The table was in the shape of a horse- 
shoe, having two vice-chairmen ; and this circum- 
stance was wrought up and played with by Dick- 
ens in the true Sam Weller and Charles Dickens 
manner. Thackeray, who is far from what is 
called a good speaker, outdid himself. There 
was his usual hesitation ; but this hesitation be- 
comes his manner of speaking and his matter, and 
is never unpleasant to his hearers, though it is, 
we are assured, most irksome to himself. This 
speech was full of pathos, and humour, and odd- 
ity, with bits of prepared parts imperfectly recol- 
lected, but most happily made good by the felici- 
ties of the passing moment. Like the * Last Min- 
strel,' 

' Each blank in faithless memory void 
The poet's glowing thought supplied.' 

It was a speech to remember for its earnestness 
of purpose and its undoubted originality. Then 
the chairman quitted, and many near and at 
a distance, quitted with him. Thackeray was 
on the move with the chairman, when, inspired 
by the moment, Jerrold took the chair, and 



Anecdotes and Reminiscences, 201 

Thackeray remained. Who is to chronicle what 
now passed ? — what passages of wit — what neat 
and pleasant sarcastic speeches in proposing 
healths — what varied and pleasant, ay, and at 
times, sarcastic acknowledgments ? Up to the 
time when Dickens left, a good reporter might 
have given all, and with ease, to future ages : but 
there could be no reporting what followed. There 
were words too nimble and too full of flame for a 
dozen Gurneys, all ears, to catch and preserve. 
Few will forget that night. There was an ' air 
of wit ' about the room for three days after. 
Enough to make the two next companies, though 
downright fools, right witty." 



M 



E. SHIKLEY BEOOKS has given an inter- 
esting account of the last occasion on which 
he saw Mr. Thackeray. It was at the Garrick 
Club, on Wednesday the 16th of December. 
Mr. Thackeray, who was dining, was, he tells us, 
in his usual spirits, which were never boisterous 
and always cheerful, and he had pleasant words 
for all present. " On that evening," adds Mr. 
Brooks, " he enjoyed himself much, in his own 
9* 



202 Thackeray / the Humourist, 

quiet way, and contributed genially to the enjoy- 
ment of those who were something less quiet ; 
and, a question arising about a subscription in aid 
of a disabled artist, he instantly offered to increase, 
if necessary, a sum he had previously promised. 
The writer's very last recollection of the ' cynic,' 
therefore, is in connexion with an unasked act of 
Christian kindness. On the following Monday 
he attended the funeral of a lady who was inter- 
red in Kensal Green Cemetery. On the Tuesday 
evening he came to his favourite club — the Gar- 
rick — and asked a seat at the table of two friends, 
who, of course, welcomed him as all welcomed 
Thackeray. It will not be deemed too minute a 
record by any of the hundreds who personally 
loved him to note where he sat for the last time 
in that club. There is in the dining-room on the 
first floor a nook near the reading room. The 
principal picture hanging in that nook, and front- 
ing you as you approach it, is the celebrated one 
from ^ The Clandestine Marriage,' w^ith Lord Ogle- 
by, Canton, and Brush. Opposite to that Thack- 
eray took his seat and dined with his friends. 
He was afterwards in the smoking room, a 



Anecdotes and Rermniacences. 203 

place in which he delighted. The Garrick Club 
will remove in a few months, and all these de- 
tails will be nothing to its new members, but 
much to many of its old ones. His place there 
will know him and them no more. On the 
"Wednesday he was out several times, and was 
seefi in Palace Gardens ' reading a book.' Before 
the dawn on Thursday, he was where there is no 
night." 

To the information concerning Mr. Thack- 
eray's family which we have already given, we 
may add the following particulars. Dr. George 
Thackeray, an uncle, we believe, of the deceased 
author, was provost of King's from 1814 till his 
death in 1850, the very dignity which, as our 
readers will remember, the good Dr. Thomas 
Thackeray, the novelist's great grandfather, had 
unsuccessfully competed for. Another connexion, 
the Hev. Mr. Thackeray, was instituted by King's 
College to a living in Norfolk in 1846, and 
another to a living in Lincolnshire in 1840. Six 
members of the family took their degrees at Cam- 
bridge from different colleges in the interval be- 
tween 1800 and 1823, and eight more Thack- 



204 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

erays stand in the list of Cambridge graduates 
between 1685 and the end of the last century. 
A cousin of the deceased, a first-class man, and 
late fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, is now one 
of the assistant-masters at Eton ; and another 
cousin, Lieutenant Edward Talbot Thackeray, of 
the Bengal Engineers, obtained, in 1862, the Yic- 
toria Cross in reward for his cool intrepidity and 
daring in extinguishing a fire in the Delhi maga- 
zine inclosure on the 16th September, 1857, under 
a heavy fire from the enemy, at the imminent 
risk of his life from an explosion. 



To his intimate friends, it must be pleasing to 
see how much progress has been made, even in 
the brief period which has elapsed since his death, 
towards a right appreciation of his character. The 
notion that the man, who with such delicate irony 
and unsparing satire laid bare the folly and wick- 
edness of " Vanity Fair," must necessarily be 
harsh and misanthropical, is already forgotten. 
Men remember now the many eloquent and ten- 
der passages in which he touches upon human 
frailty, or depicts the brighter side of life, the 
many noble appeals which he has made in favour 



Anecdotes o/nd Reminiscences, 205 

of charity and forbearance. l!Tor is this entirely 
due to our natural tenderness towards those who 
have just passed through that dark and narrow 
gateway whither all human footsteps tend. For 
some time past, these truer ideas of his private 
character have been gaining ground. It is said 
that of late, and since the one great over-shadow- 
ing affliction of his domestic life had been softened 
down, nothing had caused him so much pain as his 
sense that his satirical writings had led many to 
regard him as a heartless cynic. It was natural 
that he should strive to remove this impression ; 
but the proofs of his good-heartedness are too nu- 
merous, and many of too old a date, as in his kind- 
ness to Maginn, to Louis Marvy and others, to be 
attributed to this cause. One of the newspaper 
reporters, in describing the funeral, touchingly re- 
marks that some persons took a farewell sorrowful 
look into his grave, who were not recognized there 
among the great assemblage of literary and artis- 
tic celebrities, and whose bond of sympathy or 
ground of gratitude towards the deceased were 
known only to themselves. To those who knew 
best his private life this will be most intelligible. 
Time will assuredly do justice to his memory. 



206 Thackeray / the Hunxourist. 



MR. THACKERAY'S PUBLIC SPEECHES: 

A Selection fr 0771 Notes taken on various 
occasio?is. 



The pecnliar h-umour of Mr. Thackeray is no- 
where more readily discernible than in his 
speeches. These were always unstudied, as the 
occasions when they were uttered allowed that 
freedom of fancy, and play of sudden thought, of 
which the pen is not always willing to make use. 
As such it is believed that these specimens of his 
public speaking, hitherto uncollected, will be wel- 
come to his admirers. 

LrrEKATUKE VeTSUS POLITICS. 

1848. 
" If the ap23robation which my profession re- 
ceives is such as Mr. Adolphus is pleased to say it 
has been [he had just been speaking of the very 
high importance of this branch of literature, and 
of Mr. Thackeray as one of its most distinguished 
ornaments], I can only say that we are nearly as 
happy in this country as our brother literary men 
are in foreign countries ; and that we have all but 
arrived at the state of dethroning you all. I don't 
wish that this catastrophe should be brought about 
for the sake of personal quiet ; for one, I am desi- 
rous to read my books, write my articles, and get 



His PubUc Speeches. 207 



my money. I don't wish that tliat should take 
place ; but if I survey mankind, not ' from China 
to Peru,' but over the map of Europe, with that 
cursory glance which novel-writers can afford to 
take, I see nothing but literary men who seem 
to be superintending the affairs of the Continent, 
and only our happy island which is exempt from 
the literary despotism. Look to Italy, towards 
the boot of which I turn my eyes, and first, I 
find that a great number of novelists and literary 
men are l)oiileversing the country from toe to 
heel, turning about I^aples, and kicking Rome 
here and there, and causing a sudden onward 
impetus of the monarchy of the great Carlo Al- 
berto himself. If I go to France, I find that men, 
and more particularly men of my own profession 
and Mr. James's profession, are governing the 
country ; I find that writers of fiction and authors 
in general are ruling over the destinies of the 
empire ; that Pegasus is, as it were, the charger 
of the first citizen of the Republic. But arriving 
at my own country. I beseech you to remember 
that there was a time, a little time ago, on the 
' 10th of April last,' when a great novelist — a 
great member of my own profession — was stand- 
ing upon Kennington Common in the van of 
liberty, prepared to assume any responsibility, to 
take upon himself any direction of government, 
to decorate himself with the tricolour sash, or the 
Robespierre waistcoat ; and but for the timely, 



208 Thackeray / the Humourist, 



and I may say ' special ' intei*positioii of many 
who are here present, you might have been 
at present commanded by a president of a literary 
repnbhc, instead of by our present sovereign. I 
doubt whether any presidents of any literary 
republics would contribute as much to the funds 
of this society. I don't believe that the country 
as yet requires so much of our literary men ; but 
in the meanwhile I suppose it must be the task 
and endeavour of all us light practitioners of 
literature to do our best, to say our little say in 
the honestest way we can, to tell the truth as 
heartily and as simply as we are able to tell it, 
to expose the humbug, and to support the honest 
man." 

THE REALITY OF THE KOVELIST's CREATION. 

1849. 

" I suppose, Mr. Chairman, years ago when "you 
had a duty to perform, you did not think much 
about, or look to, what men of genius and men 
of eloquence in England might say of you ; but 
you went and you did your best with all your 
power, and what was the result ? You determined 
to do your best on the next occasion. I believe 
that is the philosophy of what I have been doing 
in the course of my life ; I don't know whether 
it has tended to fame or to laughter, or to serious- 
ness ; but I have tried to say the truth, and as 
far as I know, I have tried to describe what I 



His Pvhlic Speeches. 209 



saw before me, as well as I best might, and to 
like my neighbour as well as my neighbour would 
let me like him. All the rest of the speech which 
I had prepared, has fled into thin air ; the only 
part of it which I remember was an apology for, 
or rather, an encomium of, the profession of us 
novelists, which, I am bound to say, for the 
honour of our calling, ought to rank with the 
very greatest literary occupations. Why should 
historians take precedence of us ? Our person- 
ages are as real as theirs. For instance, I main- 
tain that our friends Parson Adams and Dr. 
Primrose are characters as authentic as Dr. 
Sacheverell, or Dr. Warburton, or any reverend 
personage of their times. Gil Bias is quite as 
real and as good a man as the Duke of Lerma, 
and, I believe, a great deal more so. I was 
thinking too, that Don Quixote was to my mind 
as real a man as Don John or the Duke of Alva ; 
and then I was turning to the history of a gen- 
tleman of wliom I am particularly fond — a school- 
fellow of mine before Dr. Kussell's time. I 
was turning to the life and history of one wdth 
whom we are all acquainted, and that is one 
Mr. Joseph Addison, who, I remember, was 
made Under-Secretary of State at one period of 
his life, under another celebrated man. Sir 
Charles Hedges, I think it was, but it is now so 
long ago, I am not sure ; but I have no doubt 
Mr. Addison was much more proud of his con- 



210 Thacheray / the Humowrist. 



nexion with Sir Charles Hedges, and his place in 
Downing-street, and his red box, and his quarter's 
salary, punctually and regularly paid ; I dare say 
he was much more proud of these, than of any 
literary honour which he received, such as being 
the author of the ' Tour to Italy,' and the 
* Campaign.' But after all, though he was in- 
dubitably connected with Sir Charles Hedges, 
there was another knight with whom he was 
much more connected, and that was a certain Sir 
Roger de Coverley, whom we have always loved, 
and believed in a thousand times better than a 
thousand Sir Charles Hedges. And as I look 
round at this my table, gentlemen, I cannot but 
perceive that the materials for my favourite 
romances are never likely to be wanting to future 
authors. I don't know that anything I have 
written has been generally romantic ; but if I 
were disposed to write a romance, I think I 
should like to try an Indian tale, and I should 
take for the heroes of it, or for some of the heroes 
of it — I would take the noble lord whom I see 
opposite to me [Lord I^apier] 'with the Sutlej 
flowing before him, and the enemy in his front, 
and himself riding before the British army, with 
his little son Arthur and his son Gliarles by his 
side. I am sure, in all the regions of romance, 
I could find nothing more noble and aflecting 
than that story, and I hope some of these days, 
some more able novelist will undertake it." 



His Public Sjpeeches. 211 



AUTHOKS AND THEIR PATRONS. 
1851. 

" Literary men are not by any means, at this 
present time, that most unfortunate and most 
degraded set of people whom they are sometimes 
represented to be. If foreign gentlemen should by 
any chance go to see ' The Rivals ' represented at 
one of our theatres, they will see Captain Abso- 
lute and Miss Lydia Languish making love to one 
another, and conversing, if not in the costume of 
our present day, or such as gentlemen and ladies 
are accustomed to use, at any rate in something 
near it ; whereas, when the old father Sir Anthony 
Absolute comes in, nothing will content the stage 
but that he should appear with red heels, large 
buckles, and an immense Eamilies wig. This is 
the stage tradition : they won't believe in an old 
man, unless he appears in this dress, and with 
this wig ; nor in an old lady, unless she comes 
forward in a quilted petticoat and high-heeled 
shoes ; nor in Hamlet's gravedigger, unless he 
wears some four-and-twenty waistcoats ; and so 
on. In my trade, in my especial branch of lite- 
rature, the same tradition exists ; and certain 
persons are constantly apt to bring forward, or to 
believe in the existence at this moment, of the 
miserable old literary hack of the time of George 
the Second, and bring him before us as the lite- 
rary man of this day. I say that that disreputable 



212 Thackeray / the Humourist, 



old phantom ought to be hissed out of society. 
I don't believe in the literary man being obliged 
to resort to ignoble artifices and mean flatteries, 
to get places at the tables of the great, and to 
enter into society upon sufferance. I don't be- 
lieve in the patrons of this present day, except 
such patrons as I am happy to have in you, and 
as any honest man might be proud to have, and 
shake by the hand, and be shaken by the hand 
by. Therefore I propose from this day forward, 
that the oppressed literary man should disappear 
from among us. The times are altered ; the people 
don't exist ; ' the patron and the jail,' praise God, 
are vanished from out our institutions. It may 
be possible that the eminent Mr. Edmund Curl 
stood in the pillory in the time of Queen Anne, 
who, thank God, is dead ; it may be, that in the 
reign of another celebrated monarch of these 
realms. Queen Elizabeth, authors who abused the 
persons of honours, would have their arms cut off 
on the first offence, and be hanged on the second. 
Gentlemen, what "would be the position of my 
august friend and patron, Mr. Punch, if that 
were now the case ? Where would be his hands, 
and his neck, and his ears, and his bowels ? He 
would be disembowelled and his members cast 
about the land. We don't want patrons, we want 
friends ; and I thank God, we have them. And 
as for any idea that our calling is despised by the 
world, I do for my part protest against and deny 



His Public Speeches. 213 



the wliole statement. I have been in all sorts of 
society in this world, and I never have been de- 
spised that I know of. I don't believe there has 
been a literary man of the slightest merit, or of 
the slightest mark, who did not greatly advance 
himself by his literary labours. I see along this 
august table gentlemen whom I have had the 
honour of shaking by the hand and gentlemen 
whom I never should have called my friends, but 
for the humble literary labours 1 have been en- 
gaged in. And, therefore, I say, don't let us be 
pitied any more. As for pity being employed 
upon authors, especially in my branch of the pro- 
fession, if you will but look at the novelists of the 
present day, I think you will see it is altogether 
out of the question to pity them. We will take 
in the first place, if you please, a great novelist 
who is the great head of a great party in a great 
assembly in this country. When this celebrated 
man went into his county to be proposed to repre- 
sent it, and he was asked on what interest he 
stood ? he nobly said, ' he stood on his head.^ 
And who can question the gallantry and brilliancy 
of that eminent crest of his, and what man will 
deny the great merit of Mr. Disraeli ? Take next 
another novelist, who writes from his ancestral 
hall, and addresses John Bull in letters on mat- 
ters of politics, and John Bull buys eight editions 
of those letters. Is not this a prospect for a 
novelist ? There is a third, who is employed upon 



214 Thackeray / the Humourist. 



this very evening, heart and hand, heart and voice, 
I may say, on a work of charity. And what is the 
consequence ? The Queen of the reahn, the 
greatest nobles of the empire, all the great of the 
^vorld, will assemble to see him and do him 
honour. I say, therefore, don't let us have pity. 
I don't want it till I really do want it. Of course 
it is impossible for us to settle the mere prices 
by which the works of those who amuse the public 
are to be paid. I am perfectly aware that Signer 
Twankeydillo, of the Italian Opera, and Made- 
moiselle Petitpas, of the Haymarket, will get a 
great deal more money in a week, for the skilful 
exercise of their chest and toes, than I, or you, or 
any gentleman, shall be able to get by our brains 
and by weeks of hard labour. We cannot help 
these differences in payment, we know there must 
be high and low payments in our trade as in all 
trades ; that there must be gluts of the market, 
and over production ; that there must be success- 
ful machinery, and rivals, and brilliant importa- 
tions from foreign countries ; that there must be 
hands out of employ, and tribulation of workmen. 
But these ill winds which afflict us, blow fortunes 
to our successors. These are natural evils. It is 
the progress of the world, rather than any evil 
which we can remedy, and that is why I say this 
society acts most wisely and justly in endeavouring 
to remedy, not the chronic distress, but the tem- 
porary evil ; that it finds a man at the moment of 



His Public Sjpeeches. 215 

the pinch of necessity, helps him a little, and gives 
him a ' God sj)eed,' and sends him on his way. 
For my own part I have felt that necessity, and 
bent under that calamity ; and it is because I have 
found friends who have nobly, with God's blessing, 
helped me at that moment of distress, that I feel 
deeply interested in the ends of a Society,* which 
has for its object to help my brethren in similar 
need." 

THE novelist's FUTURE LABOURS. 

1852. 
" We, from this end of the table [on occasion 
of the Royal Literary Fund dinner], speak humbly 
and from afar off. "W"e are the usefuls of the 
company, who over and over again perform our 
little part, deliver our little messages, and then 
sit down ; whereas you, yonder, are the great stars 
of the evening ; — you are collected with much 
care, and skill, and ingenuity, by the manager of 
this benefit performance ; you perform Macbeth 
and Hamlet, we are the Hozencrantzes and Guil- 
densterns ; we are the Banquos, — as I know a 
Banquo who has shaken his gory old wig at Drnry 
Lane, at a dozen Macbeths. We resemble the 
individual in plush, whom gentlemen may have 
seen at the Opera, who comes forward and de- 
murely waters the stage, to the applause of the 
audience — never mind who is the great Taglioni, 
or the Lind, or the Wagner, who is to receive all 
* Royal Literary Fund. 



216 Thackeray / the HumourisL 



the glory. For my part, I am liappy to fulfil that 
humble office, and to make my little spurt, and 
to retire, and leave the place for a greater and 
more able performer. How like British charity 
is to British valour ! It always must be well fed 
before it comes into action ! We see before us a 
ceremony of this sort, which Britons always un- 
dergo with pleasure. There is no tax which the 
Briton pays so cheerfully as the dinner-tax. Every 
man here, I have no doubt, who is a little ac- 
quainted with the world, must have received, in 
the course of the last month, a basketful of tickets, 
inviting him to meet in this place, for some pur- 
pose or other. "We have all rapped upon this 
table, either admiring the speaker for his elo- 
quence, or, at any rate, applauding him when he 
sits down. We all of us know — we have had it 
a hundred times — the celebrated flavour of the 
old Freemasons' mock-turtle, and the celebrated 
Freemasons' sherry ; and if I seem to laugh at the 
usage, the honest, good old English usage, of 
eating and drinking, which brings us all together, 
for all sorts of good purposes — do not suppose that 
I laugh at it any more than I would at good, old, 
honest John Bull, who has under his good, huge, 
boisterous exterior, a great deal of kindness and 
goodness at the heart of him. Our festival may 
l3e compared with such a person ; men meet here 
and shake hands, kind hearts grow kinder over 
the table, and a silent almoner issues forth 



His Public Speeches, 217 



from it, the festival over, and gratifies poor 
people, and reKeves the suffering of the poor, 
which would never be relieved but for your kind- 
ness. So that there is a grace that follows after 
your meat and sanctifies it. We have heard the 
historians and their calling worthily exalted just 
now ; but it seems to me that my calling will be 
the very longest and the last of those of all 
the literary gentlemen I see before me. Long 
after the present generation is dead — of readers 
and of authors of books — there must be kindness 
and generosity, and folly and fidelity, and love and 
heroism, and humbug in the world ; and, as long 
as they last, my successors, or the successors of 
the novelists who come long after us, will have 
plenty to do, and plenty of subjects to write upon. 
There may chance to be a time when wars will be 
over, and the ' decisive battles ' of the w^orld will 
not need a historian. There may arrive a time 
when the Court of Chancery itself will be extin- 
guished ; and, as perhaps your Lordship is aware, 
there is a certain author of a certain work called 
' Bleak House,' who, for the past three months, 
has been assaulting the Court of Chancery in a 
manner that I cannot conceive that ancient insti- 
tution will survive. There mav be a time when 
the Court of Chancery will cease to exist, and 
when the historian of the 'Lives of the Lord 
Chancellors ' will have no calling. I have often 
speculated upon what the successors of the 
10 



218 Thackeray / the Humourist. 



Novelists in future ages may have to do ; and I 
have fancied them occupied with the times and 
people of our own age. If I could fancy a man 
so occupied hereafter, and busied we will say with 
a heroic story, I would take the story which I 
heard hinted at the other night by the honoured, 
the oldest, the bravest and greatest man in this 
country — I would take the great and glorious 
action of Cape Danger, when, striking to the 
powers above alone, the Birkenhead went down ! 
When, with heroic courage and endurance, the 
men remained on the decks, and the women and 
children were allowed to go away safe, as the 
people cheered them, and died doing their duty ! 
I know of no victory so sublime in any annals of 
the feats of English valour — I know of no story 
that could inspire a great author or novelist better 
than that. Or, suppose we should take the story 
of an individual of the present day, whose name 
has been already mentioned ; we might have a 
literary hero, not less literary than Mr. David 
Copperfield, or Mr. Arthur Pendennis, who is 
defunct : we might have a literary hero who, at 
twenty years of age, astonished the world with, 
his brilliant story of ^ Yivian Grey ; ' who, in a 
little time afterwards, and still in the youthful 
period of his life, amazed and delighted the public 
with ^ The Wondrous Tale of Alroy ; ' who, pres- 
ently following up the course of his career, and 
the development of his philosophical culture, ex- 



His Public Speeches, 219 



plained to a breatHess and listening world the 
great Caucasian mystery ; who, quitting literature, 
then went into politics ; met, faced, and fought, 
and conquered the great political giant, and great 
orator of those days j who subsequently led thanes 
and earls to battle, and caused reluctant squires 
to carry his lance ; and who, but the other day, 
went in a gold coat to kiss the hand of his Sove- 
reign, as Leader of the House of Commons and 
Chancellor of Her Majesty's Exchequer. What 
a hero that will be for some future .novelist, and 
what a magnificent climax for the third volume 
of his story ! " 



COMMEKCE AND LITEKATUEE. 

1857.* 

" I feel it needful for me to be particularly 
cautious whenever I come to any meeting in the 
city which has to deal with money and monetary 
affairs. It is seldom that I appear at all in these 
regions, unless, indeed, it be occasionally to pay 
a pleasing visit to Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, 
in Bouverie Street, or to Messrs. Smith and Co., 
of Cornhill. But I read my paper like every 
good Briton, and from that I gather a lesson of 
profound caution in speaking to mercantile men 
on subjects of this kind. Supposing, for instance, 
that I have shares in the Bundelcund Banking 

* Jklr. Thackeray was in the chair at the Commercial 
Travellers' Dinner, in 1857. 



220 Thackeray / the HumouTist, 



Company, or in the Royal British Diddlcsex 
Bank : I come down to a meeting of the share- 
holders, and hear an honoured treasurer and an 
admirable president make the most flourishing 
reports of the state of our concern, showing to 
us enormous dividends accompanied with the 
most elegant bonuses ; and proving to us that 
our funds are invested in the most secure way at 
Bogleywallak, Bundelcund, and Branksea Castle. 
I go away delighted at the happy prospect before 
my wife and family, feeling perfect confidence 
that those innocent beings will be comfortable 
for the rest of their lives. "What, then, is my 
horror when, in one brief fortnight after, instead 
of those enormous dividends and elegant bonuses, 
I am served with a notice to pay up a most pro- 
digious sum ; when I find that our estates at 
Bundelcund and Bogleywallak have been ravaged 
by the Bengal tiger ; that the island of Branksea 
is under water ; that our respected president is 
obliged to go to Spain for the benefit of his 
health, and our eloquent treasurer cannot abide 
the London fog. You see I must be a little 
careful. But, granted that the accounts we 
have here have not, like our dinner, been sub- 
jected to an ingenious culinary process ; granted 
that you have spent, as I read in your report, 
25,000Z. in raising a noble school and grounds ; 
that you have collected around you the happy 
juvenile faces which I see smiling on yonder 



His Pvhlic Speeches. 221 



benches, to be tlie objects of your Christian kind- 
ness ; granting all this to be true, then, gentle- 
men, I am your most humble servant, and no 
words that I can find can express my enthusiastic 
admiration for what you have done. I sincerely 
wish, on behalf of my own class, the literary pro- 
fession, that we could boast of anything as good. 
I wish that we had an institution to which we 
could confide our children, instead of having to 
send them about to schools as we do, at an awful 
cost. When the respected Mr. Squeers of Do- 
the-boys Hall, announces that he proposes to take 
a limited number of pupils — I should rather say 
a number of very limited pupils — it is not because 
he is in love with the little darlings that he does 
it, but because he designs to extract a profit out 
of them. It always pains me to think of the 
profits to be screwed out of the bellies of the poor 
little innocents. Why have we not, as men 
of letters, some such association as that which you 
have got up ? I appeal to my literary brethren, 
if any of them are present, whether we, the men 
of the line, cannot emulate the men of the road? 
A week ago, a friend engaged in my own profes- 
sion, making his 1,000^. a year, showed me his 
half-yearly account of his two little boys at 
school. These little heroes of six and seven, 
who are at a very excellent school, where 
they are well provided for, came home with 
a little bill in their pocket which amounted to 



222 Thackeray / tM Humourist. 

the sum of 75Z. for the half year. Now think 
of this poor Paterfamilias earning his mo- 
derate IjOOOZ. a year, out of which he has liis 
life assurance, his income-tax, and his house- 
rent to pay, with three or four poor relations 
to support — for doubtless we are all blessed with 
those appendages — with the lieavy bills of his wife 
and daughters for millinery and mantua-making, 
to meet, especially at their present enormous rates 
and sizes. Think of this over-burdened man 
having to pay 75?. for one half-year's schooling 
of his little boys ! Let the gentlemen of the press, 
then, try to devise some scheme which shall 
benefit them, as you have undoubtedly benefited 
by what you have a«3complished for yourselves. 
We are all travellers and voyagers who must em- 
bark on life's ocean ; and before you send your 
boys to sea you teach them to swim, to navigate 
the ship, and guide her into port. The last time 
I visited America, two years ago, I sailed on 
board the Afi'ica^ Captain Harrison. As she was 
steaming out of Liverpool one fine blowy October 
day, and was hardly over the bar, when, animated 
by those peculiar sensations not uncommon to 
landsmen at the commencement of a sea voyage, 
I was holding on amidships (a laugh), up comes 
a quick-eyed shrewd-looking little man, who holds 
on to the next rope to me, and says, " Mr. 
Thackeray, I am the representative of the house 
of Appleton and Co., of Broadway, IS'ew York — a 



His Public Sjpeeches, 223 



most liberal and entei-prising publishing firm, wbo 
will be most bappy to do business with you." I 
don't know that we then did any business in the 
line thus delicately hinted at, because at that par- 
ticular juncture we were both of us called, by a 
heavy lurch of the ship, to a casting-up of ac- 
counts of a far less agreeable character." 



224 



Thacheray / the Hwnourisi 



m MEMOKIAM. 



By Charles Dickens, 



It has been desired by some of the personal 
friends of the great English writer who estab- 
lished this magazine, that its brief record of his 
having been stricken from among men should be 
written by the old comrade and brother in arms 
who pens these lines, and of whom he often wrote 
himself, and always with the warmest generosity. 
I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years 
ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator 
of my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly be- 
fore Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he 
told me that he had been in bed three days — that, 
after these attacks, he was troubled with cold 
shiverings, " which quite took the power of work 
out of him " — and that he had it in his mind to 
try a new remedy which he laughingly described. 



and the Ma/n of Letters. 225 

He was very cheerful and looked very bright. 
In the night of that day week, he died. 

The long interval between those two periods 
is marked in my remembrance of him by many 
occasions when he was supremely humorous, 
when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he 
was softened and serious, when he was charming 
with children. But, by none do I recall him 
more tenderly than by two or three that start 
out of the crowd, when he unexpectedly pre- 
sented himself in my room, announcing how that 
some passage in a certain book had made him 
cry yesterday, and how that he had come to din- 
ner, " because he couldn't help it," and must talk 
such passage over. ITo one can ever have seen 
him more genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and hon- 
estly impulsive, than I have seen him at these 
times. ISTo one can be surer than I, of the great- 
ness and the goodness of the heart that then dis- 
closed itself. 

"We had our differences of opinion. I thought 

that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, 

and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his 

art, which was not good for the art that he held 

11* 



226 Thdcheray / the Humourist 

in tnist. But, when we fell upon these topics, it 
was never yery gravely, and I have a lively im- 
age of him in my mind, twisting both his hands 
in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to 
make an end of the discussion. 

When Ave were associated in remembrance of 
the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he delivered a pub- 
lic lecture in London, in the course of which, he 
read his very best contribution to Punch, de- 
scribing the grown-up cares of a poor family of 
young children. ]^o one hearing him could have 
doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly 
unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and 
lowly. He read the paper most pathetically, and 
with a simplicity of tenderness that certainly 
moved one of his audience to tears. This was 
presently after his standing for Oxford, from 
which place he had dispatched his agent to me, 
with a droll note (to which he afterwards added 
a verbal postscript), urging me to " come down 
and make a speech, and tell them who he was, 
for he doubted whether more than two of the 
electors had ever heard of him, and he thought 
there might be as many as six or eight who had 



and the Man of Letters. 227 



heai'd of me." He introduced the lecture just 
mentioned, with a reference to his late election- 
eering failure, which was full of good sense, good 
spirits, and good humour. 

He had a particular delight in boys, and an 
excellent way with them. I remember his once 
asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had 
been to Eton where my eldest son then was, 
whether I felt as he did in regard of never seeing 
a boy without wanting instantly to give him a 
sovereign ? I thought of this when I looked down 
into his grave, after he was laid there, for I looked 
down into it over the shoulder of a boy to whom 
he had been kind. 

These are slight remembrances ; but it is to 
little familiar things suggestive of the voice, look, 
manner, never, never more to be encountered on 
this earth, that the mind first turns in a bereave- 
ment. And greater things that are known of 
him, in the way of his warm affections, his quiet 
endurance, his unselfish thoughtfulness for others, 
and his munificent hand, may not be told. 

If, in the reckless vivacity of his youth, his 
satirical pen had ever gone astray or done amiss, 



228 Thackeray y the Humourist 



he had caused it to prefer its own petition for for- 
giveness, long before : 

I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain ; 

The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain ; 

The idle word that he'd wish back again. 

In no pages should I take it upon myself at 
this time to discourse of his books, of his refined 
knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaintance 
with the weaknesses of human nature, of his de- 
lightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint 
and touching ballads, of his mastery over the Eng- 
lish language. Least of all, in these pages, en- 
riched by his brilliant qualities from the first of 
the series, and beforehand accepted by the Public 
through the strength of his great name. 

But, on the table before me, there lies all 
that he had written of his latest and last story. 
That it would be very sad to any one — that it is 
inexpressibly so to a writer — in its evidences of 
matured designs never to be accomplished, of in- 
tentions begun to be executed and destined never 
to be completed, of careful preparation for long 
roads of thought that he was never to traverse, 
and for shining goals that he was never to reach, 



and the Man of Letters. 229 

will be readily believed. The pain, however, 
that I have felt in perusing it, has not been 
deeper than the conviction that he was in the 
healthiest vigour of his powers when he wrought 
on this last labour. In respect of earnest feeling, 
far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a cer- 
tain loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I 
beheve it to be much the best of all his works. 
That he fully meant it to be so, that he had be- 
come strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed 
great pains upon it, I trace in almost every page. 
It contains one picture which must have caused 
him extreme distress, and which is a mastei-piece. 
There are two children in it, touched with a hand 
as loving and tender as ever a father caressed his 
little child with. There is some young love, as 
pure and innocent and pretty as the truth. And 
it is very remarkable that, by reason of the singu- 
lar construction of the story, more than one main 
incident usually belonging to the end of such a fic- 
tion is anticipated in the beginning, and thus there 
is an approach to completeness in the fragment, 
as to the satisfaction of the reader's mind con- 
cerning the most interesting persons, which could 



230 Thackeray ; the Humourist 



hardly liave been better attained if the writer's 
breaking-olf had been foreseen. 

The last line he wrote, and the last proof he 
corrected, are among these papers through which 
I have so sorrowfully made my way. The con- 
dition of the little pages of manuscript where 
Death stopped his hand, shows that he had car- 
ried them about, and often taken them out of his 
pocket here and there, for patient revision and in- 
terlineation. The last words he corrected in 
print, were, " And my heart throbbed with ex- 
quisite bliss." God grant that on that Christmas 
Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and 
threw up his arms as he had been wont to do 
when very weary, some consciousness of duty 
done and Christian hope throughout life humbly 
cherished, may have caused his own heart so to 
throb, when he passed away to his Eedeemer's 
rest ! 

He was found peacefully lying as above 
described, composed, undisturbed, and to all ap- 
pearance asleep, on the twenty-fourth of Decem- 
ber, 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year ; 
so young a man, that the mother who blessed him 



and the Mmi of Letters. 231 

in his first sleep, blessed him in his last. Twenty 
years before, he had written, after being in a 
white sc[uall : 

And when, its force expended, 
The harmless storm was ended, 
And, as the sunrise splendid 

Came blushing o'er the sea ; 
I thought, as day was breaking, 
My little girls were waking. 
And smiling, and making 

A prayer at home for me. 

Those little girls had grown to be women when 
the mournful day broke that saw their father 
lying dead. In those twenty years of companion- 
ship with him, they had learned much from him ; 
and one of them has a literary course before her, 
worthy of her famous name. 

On the bright wintry day, the last but one of 
the old year, he was laid in his grave at Kensal 
Green, there to mingle the dust to which the 
mortal part of him had returned, with that of a 
third child, lost in her infancy, years ago. The 
heads of a great concourse of his fellow- workers 
in the Arts, were bowed around his tomb. 



232 Thackeray / the Humourist 



W. M. THACKEEAY. 
By Anthony Trollope 



" Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tarn cari 
capitis ? — What shame to wail with tears the loss 
of so dear a head, or when will there be an end 
to such weeping ? " Now, at the present moment, 
it is not so much that he who has left us was 
known, admired, and valued, as that he was 
loved. The fine grey head, the dear face with 
its gentle smile, the sweet, manly voice which we 
knew so well, with its few words of kindest greet- 
ing ; the gait, the manner, and personal presence 
of him whom it so delighted us to encounter in 
our casual comings and goings about the town — 
it is of these things, of these things lost for ever, 
that we are now thinking ! We think of them as 
of treasures which are not only lost, but which 



cmd the Man of Letters. 233 

can never be replaced. He who knew Thackeray 
will have a vacancy in his heart's inmost casket, 
which must remain vacant till he dies. One 
loved him almost as one loves a woman, tenderly 
and with thoughtfulness — thinking of him when 
away from him as a source of joy which cannot 
be analysed, but is full of comfort. One who 
loved him, loved him thus because his heart was 
tender, as is the heart of a woman. 

It need be told to no one that four years ago 
— four years and one month at the day on which 
these words will come before the reader — this 
Magazine was commenced under the guidance; 
and in the hands, oj? Mr. Thackeray. It is not 
for any of us who were connected with him in the 
enterprise to say whether this was done success- 
fully or not ; but it is for us — for us of all men — 
to declare that he was the kindest of guides, the 
gentlest of rulers, and, as a fellow-workman, libe- 
ral, unselfish, considerate, beyond compare. It 
has been said of him that he was jealous as a 
writer. "We of the Cornhill knew nothing of such 
jealousy. At the end of two years Mr. Thack- 
eray gave up the management of the Magazine, 



234 Thackeray / the Humourist 

finding that there was much in the very nature 
of the task which embarrassed and annoyed him. 
He could not bear to tell an ambitious aspirant 
that his aspirations were in vain ; and worse 
again, he could not endure to do so when a lady 
was his suppliant. Their letters to him were 
thorns that festered in his side, as he has told us 
himself. In truth it was so. There are many 
who delight in wielding the editorial ferule, good 
men and true, no doubt, who open their hearts 
genially to genius when they find it ; but they 
can repress and crush the incapable tyro, or the 
would-be poetess who has nothing to support her 
but her own ambition, if not with delight, at least 
with satisfaction. Of such men are good editors 
made. Whether it be a point against a man, or 
for him, to be without such power, they who 
think of the subject may judge for themselves. 
Thackeray had it not. He lacked hardness for 
the place, and therefore, at the end of two years, 
he relinquished it. 

But he did not on that account in any way 
sever himself from the Magazine. His Moimd- 
ahout Pajpers^ the first of which appeared in our 



and the Man of Letters. 235 



fii*st number, were carried on through 1862, and 
were completed in the early part of 1863. Lovel 
the Widower^ and his Lectures on the Four 
Georges, appeared under his own editorship. 
Philip was so commenced, but was completed 
after he had ceased to reign. It was only in 
November last, as our readers may remember, 
that a paper appeared from his hand, entitled. 
Strange to say, on Cliib Paper. In this he ridi- 
culed a silly report as to Lord Clyde, which had 
spread itself about the town, — doing so with that 
mingled tenderness and sarcasm for which he was 
noted, — the tenderness being ever for those 
named, and the sarcasm for those unknown. As 
far as we know, they were the last words he lived 
to publish. Speaking of the old hero who has 
just gone he bids us remember that " censure and 
praise are alike to him ; — * The music warbling 
to the deafened ear. The incense wasted on the 
fimeral bier ! ' " How strange and how sad that 
these, his last words, should now come home to 
us as so fitted for himself ! Not that we believe 
that such praise is wasted, — even on the spirit of 
him who has gone. 



236 Thackeray / the Humourist 

Comes the blind Fury witli abhorred shears, 

And slits the thin spun life ! " But not the praise," 

Phcebus replied, and touched my trembling ears. 

Why should the dead be inaccessible to the glory 
given to them by those who follow them on the 
earth ? He, of whom we speak, loved such in- 
cense when living. If that be an infirmity he 
was so far infirm. But we hold it to be no in- 
firmity. Who is the man who loves it not? 
Where is the public character to whom it is not 
as the breath of his nostrils ? But there are men 
to whom it is given to conceal their feelings. Of 
such Thackeray was not one. He carried his 
heart-strings in a crystal case, and when they 
were wrung or when they were soothed all their 
workings were seen by friend and foe. 

When he died he was still at work for this 
Magazine. He was writing yet another novel 
for the delight of its readers. " Shall we continue 
this story -telling business and be voluble to the 
end of our age ? Will it not be presently time, O 
prattler, to hold your tongue and let younger 
people speak ? " These words, of course, were his 
own. You will find them in that Eoundabout 



and the Man of Letters. 237 

Paper of his, De Finibus^ wHcli was printed in 
August, 1862. He was voluble to the end ; — 
alas, that it should have been the end ! The 
leisure time of which he was thinking never came 
to him. That presently was denied to him, nor 
had he lived would it have been his for many a 
year to come. He was young in power, young 
in heart as a child, young even in constitution in 
spite of that malady which carried him off. But, 
though it was so, Thackeray ever spoke of him- 
self, and thought of himself, as of one that was 
old. He in truth believed that the time for let- 
ting others speak was speedily coming to him. 
But they who knew him did not believe it, and 
his forthcoming new novel was anxiously looked 
for by many who expected another Esmond. 

I may not say how great the loss will be to 
the Cornhill^ but I think that those concerned in 
the matter will be adjudged to be right in giving 
to the public so much of this work as he has left 
behind him. A portion of a novel has not usually 
much attraction for general readers ; but we ven- 
ture to think that this portion will attract. They 
who have studied Mr. Thackeray's characters in 



238 Thackeray y the Humourist 

fiction, — and it cannot be doubted that they have 
become matter of study to many, — will wish to 
follow him to the last, and will trace with a sad 
but living interest the first rough lines of the 
closing portraits from his hand. 

I shall not attempt here any memoir of Mr. 
Thackeray's life. Such notices as the passing day 
requires have been given in many of the daily 
and weekly papers, and have been given, I be- 
lieve, correctly. I may, perhaps, specially notice 
that from the pen of Mr. Hannay, which appeared 
in the Edinburgh Courant. The writing of his 
life will be a task, and we trust a work of love, 
for which there will probably be more than one 
candidate. We trust that it may fall into fitting 
hands, — into the hands of one who shall have 
loved wisely, and not too well, — ^but, above all 
things, into the hands of a true critic, lliat which 
the world will most want to know of Thackeray, 
is the effect which his writings have produced ; 
we believe that effect to have been very wide, 
and beneficial withal. Let us hope, also, that the 
task of his biography may escape the untoward 



and the Mom of Letters, 239 

hurry wMch has ruined the interest of so many 
of the memoirs of our latter-day worthies. 

Of our late Editor's works, the best known, 
and most widely appreciated are, no doubt, Yani- 
ty Fair^ Pendennis^ The Newcomes^ and Esmond, 
The first on the list has been the most widely 
popular with the world at large. Pendennis has 
been the best loved by those who have felt and 
tasted the delicacy of Thackeray's tenderness. 
The Newcomes stands conspicuously for the char- 
acter of the Colonel, who as an English gentle- 
man has no equal in English fiction. Esmoiid^ 
of all his works, has most completely satisfied the 
critical tastes of those who profess themselves* to 
read critically. For myself, I own that I regard 
Esmond as the first and finest novel in the Eng- 
lish language. Taken as a whole, I thinlv that it 
is without a peer. There is in it a completeness 
of historical plot, and an absence of that taint of 
unnatural life which blemishes, perhaps, all our 
other historical novels, which places it above its 
brethren. And, beyond this, it is replete with a 
tenderness which is almost divine, — a tenderness 
which no poetry has surpassed. Let those who 



24:0 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

doubt this go back and study again the life of 
Lady Castlewood. In Esmond^ above all his 
works, Thackeray achieves the great triumph of 
touching the innermost core of his subject, with- 
out ever wounding the taste. We catch all the 
aroma, but the palpable body of the thing never 
stays with us till it palls us. "Who ever wrote of 
love with more delicacy than Thackeray has 
written in Esmond. May I quote one passage 
of three or four lines ? "Who is there that does 
not remember the meeting between Lady Castle- 
wood and Harry Esmond after Esmond's return. 
" ^ Do you know what day it is ? ' she continued. 
^ H is the 29th December ; it is your birthday ! 
But last year we did not drink it ; — no, no ! My 
lord was cold, and my Harry was like to die ; 
and my brain was in a fever ; and we had no 
wine. But now, — now you are come again, 
bringing your sheaves with you, my dear.' She 
burst into a wild flood of weeping as she spoke ; 
she laughed and sobbed on the young man's 
heart, crying out wildly ; — ^ bringing your sheaves 
with you, — your sheaves with you ! ' " 

But if Esmond be, as a whole, our best Eng- 



and the Mmi of Letters. 241 



lish novel, Colonel Newcome is the finest single 
character in English fiction. That it has been 
surpassed by Cervantes, in Don Quixote^ we may, 
pertaps, allow, though Don Quixote has the ad- 
vantage of that hundred years which is necessary 
to the perfect mellowing of any great work. 
When Colonel Newcome shall have lived his 
hundred years, and the lesser works of Thackeray 
and his compeers shall have died away, then, and 
not till then, will the proper rank of this creation 
in literature be appreciated. 

We saw him laid low in his simple grave at 
the close of last year, and we saw the brethren of 
his art, one after another, stand up on the stone 
at the grave foot to take a last look upon the 
coffin which held him. It was very sad. There 
were the faces of rough men red with tears, who 
are not used to the melting mood. The grave was 
very simple, as became the sadness of the mo- 
ment. At such times it is better that the very 
act of interment should be without pomp or sign 
of glory. But as weeks pass by us, they, who 
love English literature, will desire to see some 
preparation for placing a memento of him in that 
11 



242 Thackeray / the Humourist. 

shrine in which we keep the monuments of our 
great men. It is to be regarded as a thing of 
course, that there should be a bust of Thackeray 
in Westminster Abbey. 



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